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Article: Museum opening of the year: Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, Paris.
- Article from:
- Apollo
- Article date:
- December 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A three-year restoration has not only transformed the Galerie d'Apollon, writes Samson Spanier: it has revealed unexpected harmonies in this great gallery's complex ensemble of paintings, sculpture and tapestries.
Few rooms in the world's museums can challenge the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre for art-historical importance. It contains twenty-eight tapestries, 118 sculpted figures and forty-one paintings. The last range over 200 years, from Charles Le Brun's Triumph of Neptune (1664) to Eugene Delacroix's Triumph of Apollo (1851). Commissioned by Louis XIV in the 1660s, the gallery's iconographic programme by Le Brun allegorises the Sun King as Apollo in a ...