sandr037

The Louvre in Paris has been around for hundreds of years, beginning as a businesslike medieval castle, and developing into a royal palace. It acquired its present style in the Renaissance under Francis I, who tore down the old castle and began to develop the dignified, sculpted facades we see today.  The Louvre has long housed a private museum for the French kings, and under Louis XIV, the Sun King, the state academies were established there.  With the revolution the museum became a public institution and the royal academies became the Ecole des Beaux Arts (and were moved to their own digs).  The photo above shows the courtyard at the turn of the century.  The monument in the foreground to Leon Gambetta was removed during World War II, but otherwise the configuration of the Louvre was unchanged until the arrival of Pei's pyramid in 1989. The following images are the scanned slides I took while producing a comprehensive image of the new construction.  For anyone...

Portraits have been around for thousands of years.   Realistic painted portraits have been around since at least the Roman Empire.   Before photography a painted portrait was an expensive luxury limited to the powerful and wealthy in society.   Any good artist hoping for success lobbied for an appointment to the court of some king, duke or tyrant.   The starving artist was NOT a career goal in the old days. Today, with ubiquitous digital cameras, portrait photos are scattered mindlessly everywhere, like gum on the sidewalks of New York City.   Similarly, painted portraits are often hard to distinguish from one another unless you know the subject, and abstract portraits, while original, are hardly portraits in the original sense.   Occasionally however, a portrait will jump out of the page and grab you emotionally, even though the subject and artist are strangers to you.   It is these works of art that can teach a lesson to an architectural illustrator...