Louvre Controversy

The worldwide, iconic centerpiece for art and history known commonly as The Louvre has been the home to the French monarchy, a battle fortress during the Hundred Years War and currently as a world-class museum with art ranging from the Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci(which some believe to be a self-portrait of DaVinci) to artifacts from Ancient Egypt to Greek, Etruscan, Native American and Near East antiquities. But the Louvre was not always the artistic mecca that the world has familiarized the name with.

Since its beginnings, the Louvre has conferred legitimacy on those who claimed it, for the brief period of a human lifetime, and as such it has been central to the history of its city and nation, even before there was a nation. It has been a wartime castle, and, rarely, a peacetime palace; it has witnessed faith, bloodshed, grandeur, and spectacle, despair, terror, and resolve that we in our time can only imagine--or reconstruct from the gilded traces left to us. The Louvre drew on the greatest talents of Europe, and was built at the cost of the misery
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Louvre refined its identity, spawning new museums with the works it shed. During World War I, the greatest masterpieces of the world's greatest museum were evacuated, as they were again from August 1938 to December 1939. The plans to save the Louvre's artworks had been made even before the Munich agreements of 1938, but thousands of crates had to be built. The Louvre, still mainly a government building housing administrative offices, had only one truck, so transport was borrowed from the Samaritaine, a nearby department store. Two days before war was declared, all the art in the Louvre was out of Paris, its priceless treasures sent out to châteaux throughout France, sometimes only a step ahead of the advancing