The Louvre's oldest section still standing above ground, its palatial Lescot Wing, dates from the late 1540s, when Francis I started the replacement of the greatly expanded medieval castle with a new design inspired by classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance architecture.

The axis begins with the Louvre courtyard, at a point now symbolically marked by a lead copy of Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV, and runs west along the Champs-Élysées to La Défense and slightly beyond.

[19] In the 1810s, Percier and Fontaine copied the giant order of the western section of the Grande Galerie, built in the early 17th century and attributed to Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau, for their design of the northern wing to connect the Tuileries with the Louvre along the rue de Rivoli.

In the late 1350s, the growth of the city and the insecurity brought by the Hundred Years' War led Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants (i.e. municipal leader) of Paris, to initiate the construction of a new protective wall beyond that of Philip II.

[23]: 33 Shortly after becoming king in 1364 Charles V abandoned the Palais de la Cité, which he associated with the insurgency led by Etienne Marcel, and made the Louvre into a royal residence for the first time, with the transformation designed by his architect Raymond du Temple.

On the northern end of the new wing, Lescot created a monumental staircase in the 1550s, long known as the Grand Degré du Roi (now Escalier Henri II, with sculpted ceilings attributed to Jean Goujon.

From early 1595 he directed the construction of the Grande Galerie, designed by his competing architects Louis Métezeau and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau, who are respectively credited with the eastern and western sections of the building by a long tradition of scholarship.

She extended it to the ground floor of the Petite Galerie, which had previously been the venue for the King's Council[31]: 16  That "summer apartment" was fitted by architect Louis Le Vau, who had succeeded Lemercier upon the latter's death in 1654.

[2]: 11 [3]: 60  Louis XIV had already left the Louvre from the beginning of 1666, immediately after the death of his mother Anne of Austria in her ground-floor apartment, and would never reside there again, preferring Versailles, Vincennes, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, or if he had to be in Paris, the Tuileries.

Jacques-Germain Soufflot in 1759 led the demolition of the upper structures of Le Vau's dome above the Pavillon des Arts,[39]: 33  whose chimneys were in poor condition,[3]: 75  and designed the northern and eastern passageways (guichets) of the Cour Carrée in the late 1750s.

This opened from what was at the time called the Place du Louvre, abutting the Lescot Wing to the west, into the Rotonde de Mars, the monumental room at the northern end of the Appartement d'été d'Anne d'Autriche.

On the eastern front of the Tuileries Palace, Percier and Fontaine had the existing buildings cleared away to create a vast open space, the Cour du Carrousel, which they had closed with an iron fence in 1801.

On 24 March 1848, the provisional government published an order that renamed the Louvre as the Palais du Peuple ("People's Palace") and heralded the project to complete it and dedicate it to the exhibition of art and industry as well as the National Library.

That initiative carried heavy political symbolism, since Gambetta was widely viewed as the founder of the Third Republic, and his outsized celebration in the middle of Napoleon III's landmark thus affirmed the final victory of republicanism over monarchism nearly a century after the French Revolution.

[1] In September 1981, newly elected French President François Mitterrand proposed the Grand Louvre plan to move the Finance Ministry out of the Richelieu Wing, allowing the museum to expand dramatically.

Percier and Fontaine thus captured something of the long-term identity of the Louvre when they described it in 1833 as "viewed as the shrine of [French] monarchy, now much less devoted to the usual residence of the sovereign than to the great state functions, pomp, festivities, solennities and public ceremonies.

[48] Meanwhile, a collection of models of ships and navy yards, initially started by naval engineer Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, was displayed between 1752 and 1793 in a Salle de Marine next to the Académie des Sciences's rooms on the first floor of the Lescot Wing.

[55] Percier and Fontaine initiated work on the Rotonde de Beauvais, which was completed during Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, but the construction of the main church building was never started.

The royal family only came back to reside in the newly rebuilt complex following Catherine de' Medici's abandonment of the Hôtel des Tournelles after her husband Henry II's traumatic death there in July 1559.

[60] Yet another library, the Bibliothèque Centrale des Musées Nationaux (BCMN), was gradually developed by the curators, mainly during the 20th century, and located on half of the attic of the Cour Carrée's southern wing, on the river-facing side.

[63] On the occasion of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor's visit to Paris in 1377–1378, the main banquet was held at the Palais de la Cité but the French king used the Louvre's Grande Salle on the next day to give a major speech on his political position in the conflict now known as the Hundred Years' War.

One of the more recent ceremonial gatherings in the Louvre was a candlelit dinner given in the Salle des Caryatides on 10 April 1957 in honor of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, hosted by French President René Coty at the end of their weeklong visit in Paris.

[3]: 35  In February 1625 and 1626 respectively, two major ballets burlesques directed by Daniel Rabel were performed in the Louvre's Lower Great Room (now Salle des Caryatides), with Louis XIII himself appearing as one of the dancers.

Molière again performed at the Louvre on 29 January 1664 when he directed Le Mariage forcé [fr], with Louis XIV himself playing a cameo role as an Egyptian, in the main room of the Queen Mother on the ground floor of the Cour Carrée's southern wing.

In 1810 Percier and Fontaine planned a new opera house north of what is now the Cour Napoléon, on a similar footprint to the present-day Passage Richelieu, with main entrance on the northern side facing the Palais-Royal.

[83] In the 17th century, the second floor of the Pavillon du Roi was the home of Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes until 1621, then of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, and from 1652 of Cardinal Mazarin who also established his nieces in the second-floor attic of the Lescot Wing.[3]: 49 .

Another official apartment was created for the imperial "Great Equerry" (grand écuyer) Émile Félix Fleury [fr], in the South (Denon) Wing, with entrance through an ornate portico in the Cour Lefuel.

Barely more than two years later, however, they were recreated as the Institut de France on 24 October 1795, ceremonially inaugurated in the Lescot Wing's ground-floor room (the Louvre's Salle des Caryatides) on 4 April 1796.

This initiative had been sponsored in 1899 by American diplomat Robert John Thompson in gratitude of the French gift of the Statue of Liberty, and originally intended for a dedication at Lafayette's grave at the Picpus Cemetery during the Exposition Universelle (1900).

In 1964, Culture Minister André Malraux decided to install in the Carrousel Garden 21 bronze sculptures by Aristide Maillol which had been donated to the French state by the sculptor's former model and muse, Dina Vierny, including casts of Air, Action in Chains, The Mountain, and The River.