The Louvre is now available online; if you can’t come to Paris, he can come to you
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A year later, the culture sector has adapted in a way that was unfathomable before the pandemic. The ballet and the opera are ticketed events, but broadcast live in the salons – the The Northern Ballet company organizes a pay-as-you-can digital season in 2021. Musicians and bands have kept it interesting by hosting gigs on Instagram live from home. And museums have opened their digital doors to allow people to explore artwork in a new way–the Louvre is the last to allow access to all.
The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous of all the Louvre collectionbut there is also the Venus de Milo, the statue Victory of Samothrace and 484,000 other works of art, many of which have been in storage for years and some on loan. The database is open access but the images are not open access so they cannot be downloaded or shared.
The Louvre has had to look online to interact with its audience, due to a dizzying drop in visitor numbers. Like reported by the Smithsonian9.6 million people visited in 2019 – a figure that fell to 2.7 million in 2020, a drop of 72%.
It joins the Uffizi in Florence, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Prado in Madrid which have all had to go online to engage during the pandemic. All three joined TikTok, successfully engaging with younger audiences, especially the Offices. Paris’ Versailles is the last to connect, offering a one-minute view around the former home of Louis XIV.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace in an empty room, like the Louvre in Paris, remains closed
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Previously, only 30,000 pieces were online at the Louvre, but it is now estimated that three quarters of its archives have been cataloged digitally – an exhaustive process, as reported by NPRwhich requires each image to be accompanied by title, artist, inventory number, dimensions, materials and techniques, date and place of production, object history, location current and bibliography.
However, the appearance of a large amount of his treasures online has reignited debates over the ownership of the items and whether they should be repatriated. The Louvre has a separate catalog of works (now also part of its online collection) called MNR (National Museums Recovery) which concerns works which have been recovered by France but which may not belong to France. Some could be sacred objects, for example, and could be offensive to certain cultures if seen online, while others could have been looted by the Nazis.
The new online catalog explains that 61,000 works were stolen by the Nazis during WWII and brought back from Germany and kept in the Louvre – 45,000 owners have been successfully traced and the work has been returned to families and rightful owners.
There were also concerns that some of the other works in the Louvre came from questionable sources, i.e. filtered through the museum’s collection during the war – a curator was hired specifically in January 2020 to verify the provenance of all works acquired during the Second World War (13,943 pieces in total) between 1939 and 1945.
Many art historians and curators are convinced, however, that having his work seen online will help people look beyond the Mona Lisa (unlike in-person tours where jostling crowds can make the experience far from comfortable) and will only seek to encourage more people to visit in person, once the museum is open.
With France looking set to head into another lockdown on Wednesday and borders remaining closed to most travellers, the wonders of the Louvre could provide respite for people missing a trip to Paris.
