The louvre

The Louvre: Palimpsest Palace

Great museums serve many functions: they can study the world encyclopaedically, provide fascinating accounts of history, celebrate diverse forms of beauty, and project political power. They can also have an almost mythical presence. If myths tell of a society’s origins in the natural world, a great museum can do something similar, demonstrating how the world […]

Notre-dame de paris

Notre-Dame de Paris: from Victor Hugo to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

The archaeological crypt of the Île de la Cité reopens for the first time since the fire of Notre-Dame with an exhibition on the history of the cathedral in the 19th century. It starts with the publication of Victor Hugo’s best-selling novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which raised public awareness of this masterpiece of […]