The LOUVRE is the world's largest museum, and also one of the world's most exciting places. Its buildings offer a journey through time, while its galleries display works -- from over eight centuries -- that arouse the full range of human responses, from admiration and wonder to curiosity, lust, even anger and betrayal. This book, complete with photographs and historical drawings of the architectural development of the fortress-turned-palace-turned-museum and 300 colour plates of works in the collection, delivers an engaging account of the history that helped form this spectacular collection. Indeed it is the history of the French nation itself. Dubbed the 'museum of the people' in 1848, the Louvre today houses arguably the most comprehensive collection of art and antiquities in the world. Alexandra Bonfante-Warren has chosen some of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring, and thought-provoking examples from each of the seven departments: Egyptian Antiquities, Oriental Antiquities, Greek and Roman Antiquities, Decorative Arts, Sculpture, Paintings, and Drawings.Here are tomb paintings and sarcophagi from the Valley of the Kings, towering mythic sculptures from lost civilisations, devotional altarpieces and architectural embellishments expressing the religious fervour of the Middle Ages, and masterpieces by Giotto, Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Delacroix, David, Vermeer, lngres, and scores of others. The MUSEE D'ORSAY, housed in the old Gare d'Orsay railway station and hotel building which was saved from destruction in 1970 by a combination of timely publicity, ideality of location (opposite the Musee du Louvre), and architectural innovation, contains one of the most magnificent and extensive collections of 19th and early 20th century art in the world. The quality and variety of works in the Musee d'Orsay -- limited to the years between 1848 and 1914 -- is quite unique. Though the most well-known and probably best-loved painting style of the 19th century is Impressionism, in fact a great diversity of art can be attributed to this era. The distinctive tone of the museum's remarkable collection comes, in part, from this medley of works and styles, culled from the galleries and storage rooms of various other French museums.This book combines a thoughtful text that traces the roots of the collection through the context of the contemporary society and creative activity happening at that time with 300 colour plates of many of the museum's greatest masterpieces: Academic works by lngres, Couture, Bouguereau, and Delacroix; Impressionist and Post-Impressionist favourites by Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac; Realist, Nabis, Symbolist and Fauvist works by Millet, Denis, Gauguin, Redon, and Matisse; sculpture by Degas, Rodin, and Camille Claudel. Here are also works in other media, not in the national collections but acquired specifically to complete the museum's multi-disciplinary view of the arts during these years -- furniture, objets d'art, architecture, photography, for example -- everything on display in these areas has been acquired since the museum's formation. Jewellery and glassware by Art Nouveau artist Rene Lalique, photographic prints by Nadar, Lewis Carroll and Atget, and the architecture of the 19th century, evoked by the restoration of various elements of the former railway station itself, are but a few of the museum's other myriad attractions.