Pierre Rosenberg, Director of the Louvre, on the original idea that the museum must reflect art history and be open to everyone.

Open museum

The Louvre was designed to house a great art collection for the people of France. Was there a plan from the outset to build a canon of work where the relationships between artists, their origins, their schools and faiths could be traced across centuries? And how did architect I.M.Pei persuade President Mitterrand to allow a pyramid to be built at the Louvre? The album goes on to explore how architecture can reflect relationships between different traditions. Two great buildings, Palladio’s church of the Redentore in Venice and Sinan’s Sokullu Mehmet Pasha mosque in Istanbul illustrate shared approaches to the purpose for which the spaces were designed. This material is taken from The Open University course A216 Art and its histories.