This Paris museum, founded in 1793 in a former, somewhat neglected royal palace, wanted to make fine art accessible to everyone - which apparently succeeded.
A somewhat arrogant German visitor to the Louvre wrote in 1810 about fishwives, soldiers, peasants in wooden shoes, sack porters with tobacco pipes in hand who visited the halls.
That is commendable - and also a "painful pity", all the "rabble" between the "genius works".
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The Louvre in Paris: the aura of the originals is lost
Photo: Julian Elliott Photography / Getty Images
The fact that the world's most famous museum will even come to everyone's home in 2021 is a fitting further development of this early opening strategy.
Recently, users have access to 480,000 works, sculptures, paintings and drawings in the Louvre from their computer or mobile phone.
The aura of the originals
This new openness is a revolution.
A look into the database allows a look behind the scenes, after just a few clicks of the mouse you can see what is otherwise hidden in unfathomable spheres, what is in the depots or is stored in graphic cabinets.
The Louvre may have hesitated to demystify itself in this way, because the photos have lost some of the aura of the originals.
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Historic room in the Louvre: Don't miss the connection to the 21st century.
Photo: Sylvain Sonnet / Getty Images
But the Louvre does not want to miss the connection with the spirit of the 21st century - even though or precisely because it primarily belongs to historical works.
A few years ago he allowed the pop superstar Beyoncé to shoot a music video in the museum.
Art historians celebrated the video, published in 2018, as a historical "intervention" in Western and also very white art for which the Louvre stands.
With her imagery, Beyoncé questioned the Louvre's homemade canons.
A portrait that appears in the video, which the painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist painted in 1800 and shows a black woman named Madeleine, looked like a counter-image to Leonardo's world-famous "Mona Lisa".
Basically, Beyoncé anticipated what will be further promoted with digitization: to create new lines of sight beyond the arrangements on site, to create other mental connections.
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Artists Beyoncé and Jay-Z in front of the Mona Lisa: historical intervention in culture
And although the design of the database appears painfully brittle, although some images seem like a quick snapshot of a painting, the abundance is seductive.
More than 39,000 works are displayed under the keyword "portrait" alone, you get stuck on ancient Roman souvenirs or click on the portrait of John II the Good, who was king and warmonger of the French in the 14th century.
Of course you can easily find the "Mona Lisa";
Strangely enough, the portrait of Madeleine was not.
In general, the "Mona Lisa".
Anyone who thinks of the Louvre thinks reflexively of this portrait.
In the museum itself, it always triggers a suction, the jostling in front of it makes all other works appear less significant.
The curators have been pushing this in recent years, the Louvre has long been drawing on the myth of the "Mona Lisa", not the other way around.
Many of the ten million visitors who visited the Louvre before the pandemic came because of this woman and her smile.
Well, in the digital world, the portrait is just one of many, it stands in a row with other works, has no special role and no bulletproof glass.
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View of the database: Mona Lisa as one of many.
You can spend hours zapping through the centuries - even millennia - through artistic genres and groups of motifs.
The great lines of development in art history suddenly become comprehensible.
In post-ancient art, the motifs were for a long time influenced by Christianity, then also mythological;
At the same time, portrait art developed, followed by landscape painting: when scrolling through, you notice how nature, previously at best the background, suddenly became independent and moved into the foreground.
Most of the works come from France, followed by Italian and then Dutch art.
The French quarreled with German artists for a long time.
The Louvre has only one painting by Albrecht Dürer; it is the only one in all of France: a self-portrait that may have been intended for the artist's bride.
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Database with Dürer's self-portrait: The only painting by the German in France
Even if you only want to immerse yourself in the old masters' holdings in the Louvre, it doesn't take long before you come across the horrific German history of the 20th century.
If you enter "Dürer" in the search field, a portrait of a little boy appears, created by an unknown artist in the style of Dürer.
The picture is in a depot in Strasbourg, it was brought to Germany by the Nazis during the Second World War, and was part of the Hermann Göring collection.
Later it was restituted to France together with many other looted works of art, the actual owners of this work were never found.
The database also shows: The Louvre itself became a subject early on, for example in 1841 the Scot Patrick Allen Fraser painted the Grande Galerie. The halls remained a popular motif, for example with the German photo artist Candida Höfer, who dedicated a series to the museum in 2005. Then came, much more opulent and louder: Beyoncé. The Louvre has not yet added the video to its collection. If the museum really wants to arrive in the here and now, that would be a good idea.