THE new pavilion of Muslim art at the Louvre, designed by Rudy
Ricciotti and the veteran Mario Bellini, and inaugurated by
President Hollande last year, has transformed one courtyard of the
palace with a sympathetic brilliance rare even in architectural
gallery design.
Ricciotti was born in Algeria in 1952, and there is something
inescapably North African about the way in which the roof of the
pavilion, which has been described as a dragonfly's wing, floats
over the courtyard. In 1980, he attended architecture school in
Marseille, and in 2006 he won the French Grand Prix d'Architecture.
Earlier in the year, his equally astounding Jean Cocteau museum
opened in Menton.
Bellini could scarcely be more different; he was born in Fascist
Milan in Anno XIII (1935), and has long been regarded among Italy's
foremost architects. He is responsible for the new Verona Forum
complex and the Turin Cultural Centre.
Islamic treasures have been a part of the French national
collection since the 1793 sack of the royal palace, and include the
famous "font" of St Louis. This Syrian or Egyptian bowl dates to
the third decade of the 14th century, and was used from at least
1606 for the baptism of French princes. The growing collection
found permanent exhibition space only in 1993, in one the
subterranean galleries, measuring just 800 square metres. It always
felt much like an afterthought.
After the creation of the department of Islamic Art (2003), a
competition was launched to house some of the 14,000 items in the
collection. (A further 3500 are on loan from the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs.) Ricciotti and Bellini won (2005) with a clever
solution that eschewed the existing lines of the neo-classical
facades around the Cour Visconti.
Instead, the architects dug down 12m in the heart of the
courtyard, and suspended what appears from the side to be a golden
veil that undulates like an enormous flying carpet from eight
irregular columns. They thereby avoided allowing Western and
European architectural norms to constrain collections that spring
from a very different culture elsewhere.
Built at a cost of €40 million, two levels display 3000 objects
over 2800m². By way of comparison, the Jameel gallery is able to
display only 400 works from the reported 19,000 in the V&A's
collection (Arts, 29 September 2006), while the Met in New York
shows just one tenth of the 12,000 items in its trust.
Once I had become accustomed to the lack of height - an optical
illusion that reminded me of first entering the Blue Mosque in
Istanbul, where the dome is so flat that the surrounding hall feels
dangerously low - I followed the flow of the oddly angled glass
boxes that serve as display cabinets.
Treasure after treasure unfolded, from the seventh to the 19th
centuries, over three floors. Above ground, even on a grey, wet
Parisian afternoon, there was a soft warmth in the light, whereas
the lower galleries are deliberately darkened spaces with well
illuminated displays.
In an act of sheer genius, the opportunity has been taken to
site the Louvre's Near Eastern collection of Roman and Byzantine
works around the lower level, while the antiquities of
pre-classical Greece and Coptic and Roman Egypt are at the
courtyard level. This brings together cultures and civilisations
that rose and fell in many of the same geographical areas.
At one point, one looks down over a balcony on to the Phoenix
mosaic from Daphne, a suburb of Antioch on the Orontes (Antakya in
modern Turkey), and that of the Lebanese Church of St Christopher
at Qabr Hiram (575). This was uncovered by the philosopher and
linguist Ernest Renan in 1860/61, shortly before his controversial
and influential historical work Vie de Jésus appeared
(1863). They follow the clear pattern of the nave and aisles
of the palaeo-Christian church much like those in Petra or at Umm
al Rassas in Jordan. The mosaics of the Grand Mosque of
Damascus (painted copies) make for telling comparison.
The vestibule of a Mameluke house from Qasr Rumi in Cairo
(c.1475/1500), all five and a half tonnes of it, has been
re-erected to form a narthex-like crossing from the Daru gallery to
the main central hall. The limestone blocks composing this had been
shipped from Egypt some time between 1880 and 1884, and had
remained in packing crates till 1999. Rebuilding it for its
original purpose as a gateway is just one of the myriad of
successes achieved by the designer of the gallery, Renaud
Piérard.
At the Musée du Louvre, Rue de Rivoli, Paris. Phone 00 33 1
40 20 50 50. www.louvre.fr