The department of Byzantine Arts, the Louvre’s other runaway project

The creation of a Department of Byzantine Arts and Christianities in the East, in gestation for several years and launched by Laurence des Cars, is not in itself a bad thing. We do not contest it. But, as with many projects at the Louvre, this one will give rise to pharaonic and costly works which, clearly, are unnecessary. They are even, in the current crisis affecting the museum, further proof of the serious runaway course in which the museum’s president-director has embarked — a runaway course to which the Ministry of Culture — if it wishes finally to exercise its oversight — must put an end.

1. Rooms affected by the works discussed in this article.
The arrows indicate current visitor flows. Access via the two staircases
to the upper floor will in the future be impossible since the staircases will
be demolished. To reach the upper floors directly, one will have to go
through the Donatello Gallery or the Pre-Classical Greek Gallery

See the image in its page

Installing this new department in the designated space, at the confluence of Islamic Arts and Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the Denon Wing, is a good idea. But it should have been implemented at lower cost. It would have been enough to redeploy the collections that already exist but are distributed among these departments and that of Egyptian Antiquities in particular. This was undoubtedly not prestigious enough for the Louvre’s president-director. We are therefore about to undertake an exorbitant architectural project, which revisits work completed less than fifteen years ago, causing both the destruction of recent fittings and a modification of the circuits that will endanger works of the Italian Renaissance and Pre-Classical Greek Antiquity.

To understand this, it is necessary to take a brief tour of the site (ill. 1), proceeding from the space beneath the pyramid towards the Denon Wing (the one bordering the Seine) where are located, in particular, the Winged Victory of Samothrace…