Historian Michel Carmona brings us this daring, encyclopedic look at eight centuries of history at the Louvre, France’s most venerable cultural institution. Beginning with its inception in the 13th century and ending with the recently added glass pyramids by I.M. Pei, Carmona highlights the many guises of the Louvre during its long history through vivid descriptions and beautiful reproductions of paintings, sculptures and architectural plans. What began as the austere seat of the French feudal court would eventually flourish as a Renaissance palace under François I, who played host to countless sumptuous feasts and costume balls. Catherine de Medici would later add the Tuileries gardens, making the Louvre a paragon of European landscape architecture. Under a succession of French kings, the Louvre saw the addition of the glorious Cour Carrée and the Grande Galerie but endured some neglect when Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles. The next chapters trace the dedication of the monument as a national museum during the French Revolution, and the growth of a collection that would one day encompass some of the world’s most valuable and celebrated antiquities and works of art.