1. LA LOUVRE MUSEUM By John E. Fabilane

2. The Louvre was originally a fortress built by the French king Philippe Auguste. It was intended to reinforce the defenses that the king had ordered to be built in 1190 to protect Paris from attack via the Seine. Today, visitors can walk around the original perimeter moat and view the piers that supported the drawbridge. In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.

3. The Louvre building complex underwent a major remodeling in the 1980s and ’90s in order to make the old museum more accessible and accommodating to its visitors. To this end, a vast underground complex of offices, shops, exhibition spaces, storage areas, and parking areas, as well as an auditorium, a tourist bus depot, and a cafeteria, was constructed underneath the Louvre’s central courtyards of the Cour Napoléon and the Cour du Carrousel. The ground-level entrance to this complex was situated in the centre of the Cour Napoléon and was crowned by a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by the American architect I.M. Pei

4. The Louvre’s painting collection is one of the richest in the world, representing all periods of European art up to the Revolutions of 1848. (Works painted after that date that the Louvre once housed were transferred to the Orsay Museum upon its opening in 1986.) The Louvre’s collection of French paintings from the 15th to the 19th century is unsurpassed in the world, and it also has many masterpieces by Italian Renaissance painters and Flemish and Dutch painters of the Baroque period.

5. The department of decorative arts displays the treasures of the French kings— bronzes, miniatures, pottery, tapestries, jewelry, and furniture—while the department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities features architecture, sculpture, mosaics, bronzes, jewelry, and pottery. The department of Egyptian antiquities was established in 1826 to organize the collections acquired during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. The department of Near Eastern antiquities is most important for its collection of Mesopotamian art.

6. In 2012 a satellite location of the Louvre in the northern French town of Lens opened to the public. The museum, designed by the Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, was intended to boost the economy of the region and to alleviate crowds at the Paris site. Plans for another branch, on Saadiyat Island, off the coast of Abū Ẓ aby, were announced by the French government in 2007. A 30-year agreement called for hundreds of works of art belonging to the Louvre in Paris to be rented to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

7. Thank you http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/349409/Louvre-Museum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre-Lens