Musée du Louvre paintings [antikvár]

A number of the world's great art museums - such as Dresden and the Hermitage, the Prado and the Florentine galleries, and the museums of Munich and Vienna - have inherited the core of their collections from nobility and royalty. Others, established in the xixth and xxth centuries - the former Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin for example, the London National Gallery, the New York Metropolitan Museum and, more recently, the Washington National Gallery - have been built up gradually as the result of priváté donations and reasonably consistent purchase policies. Yet the Louvre belongs to neither category, or rather to both. In fact it originated as a royal collection, the collection of the French royal family, which means that it possesses works of rare lustre, the sort of irreplaceable masterpieces infrequent in museums of xixth century foundation. But, like its juniors, it has received and purchased somé thousands of pictures during this and the last century. This is why the Louvre, with its greater financial resources and, most important, the sustained generosity of priváté benefactors, ofFers a collection richer and more comprehensive than that of any other museum of royal origin. Jean CLOUET (painter to the King from ijió-iJ40/1J41) Francois I 0,96 x 0,74 THE COLLECTION OF THE FRENCH ROYAL FAMILY The true founder of the Crown Collection was Frangois I. Several of his predecessors had certainly commissioned and acquired paintings, as the Portrait of Jean le Bon or Fouquet's Charles VII - both having a much chequered history before their acquisition by the Louvre - go to prove. But the credit for assembling a collection of easel pictures for the sake of pleasure and example, as well as for their prestige value, must belong to Frangois I. He managed to lure the most famous artist of the period, Leonardo da Vinci,