DECORATIVE ARTS GUIDE
Exploring the Louvre Beyond the Paintings
Louvre Decorative Arts Guide: The Museum’s Most Overlooked Treasures
Before the Louvre teaches you through painting, it often teaches you through objects.
The Louvre’s Decorative Arts department is one of the museum’s richest and most underestimated collections. Spread across the Richelieu and Sully wings, it brings together around 15,000 works of European applied art, from furniture, tapestries, and metalwork to jewellery, ceramics, ivories, and the decorative arts of the Ancien Régime. What makes the department so compelling is not only its range, but the way it reveals taste as a language of power. Napoleon III’s apartments, the French Crown Jewels in the Galerie d’Apollon, and the Islamic Arts galleries all belong to this larger story.
For visitors who arrive expecting only paintings and sculpture, these rooms often come as a surprise. They are quieter, more varied, and sometimes more immersive than the museum’s best-known galleries. Here, luxury is never just decorative. It becomes evidence of hierarchy, ritual, craftsmanship, memory, and display.
THE APARTMENTS OF NAPOLEON III
If one room at the Louvre proves that decoration can be theatrical without becoming trivial, it is here.
A complete Second Empire interior
The apartments of Napoleon III are among the most spectacular interiors open to the public in France. They occupy a suite of official reception rooms in the northern range of the Richelieu wing, decorated between 1856 and 1861 for the Minister of State under Napoleon III. Everything here speaks the ceremonial language of the Second Empire at full volume: coffered ceilings of gilded carved wood, walls of crimson and gold silk damask, Savonnerie carpet runners, crystal and gilt-bronze chandeliers, and the accumulation of official luxury used to legitimise authority.
Nothing in these rooms is discreet. That is precisely the point.
The grand dining room
The sequence culminates in the grand dining room, a space of roughly 400 square metres set with the full service and centrepieces of the imperial table. Scale matters here, but so does control. The room was designed not simply to host guests, but to stage hierarchy. Each surface contributes to that effect.
For visitors who want to understand how the nineteenth century turned ceremony into architecture, this room does the work almost instantly.
Why the rooms survived
The Ministry of Finance occupied these interiors from 1871 to 1989, a long administrative afterlife that paradoxically helped preserve them. They opened to the public in 1993 and still remain one of the most astonishing and most under-visited spaces in the museum.
Very few rooms at the Louvre deliver this level of visual impact so quickly.
| After the apartments, the rest of the decorative arts stop feeling ornamental. They start feeling historical. |
THE FRENCH CROWN JEWELS IN THE GALERIE D’APOLLON
Here, treasure and architecture compete for attention, and neither quite loses.
The Regent Diamond
The Galerie d’Apollon, on the first floor of the Sully wing above the Seine, houses the surviving French Crown Jewels alongside the historic gem collections of the French monarchs. The Regent Diamond is the central object: a cushion-cut stone of 140.64 carats acquired in 1717 and still regarded as one of the finest large diamonds in the world for the quality of its cut, colour, and clarity.
It later appeared in Napoleon’s sword hilt at his coronation in 1804 and was also set into the crowns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Few objects concentrate so much dynastic symbolism in a single stone.
The gallery itself
Yet the room is never just a backdrop. Approximately 60 metres long, and crowned by Delacroix’s Apollo Vanquishing Python in the central ceiling oval, the gallery is one of the most extraordinary architectural interiors in Paris. The mistake most visitors make here is simple: they look only into the cases.
The jewels matter. However, the room matters just as much.
How to read the space
The best way to experience the gallery is to let the eye move between object and ceiling, between stone, gold, glass, and painting. In that rhythm, the logic of royal display becomes clear. Value is not isolated in the diamond. It is distributed across the entire setting.
That is why the gallery belongs fully inside the decorative arts department, not merely beside it.
| Once the eye adjusts to royal magnificence, another part of the department reveals how contemporary architecture can still carry the same ambition. |
THE ISLAMIC ARTS COLLECTION
This is the part of the department that surprises visitors twice: first through the objects, then through the space around them.
A new gallery below Cour Visconti
The Islamic Arts collection reopened in 2012 in a purpose-built gallery beneath the Cour Visconti in the Richelieu wing. The installation brings together around 3,000 objects, including ceramics, metalwork, textiles, manuscripts, architectural fragments, and carved ivories from Andalusia to Central Asia.
The geographical range is immense. So is the visual range.
The Ricciotti-Bellini roof
Above the inner courtyard stretches the undulating gold and white steel mesh roof designed by Rudy Ricciotti and Mario Bellini. It filters daylight through interlocking panels and transforms the entire visit into an architectural experience. Visitors often arrive for the collection and remember the roof; just as often, they arrive for the roof and stay for the collection.
That exchange is part of the success of the project.
Why this section matters
The importance of these rooms lies in more than novelty. They widen the department beyond French court culture and show how the Louvre can stage decorative arts across civilisations without flattening them into a single style. As a result, the Islamic Arts galleries feel both distinct and fully integrated.
They are among the most beautiful contemporary spaces inside the museum.
Practical note
The Department of Islamic Art still exists at the Louvre, but the Cour Visconti page is currently marked “Actuellement fermé” on the museum’s website. For that reason, it is safer to describe the collection and the architectural project without implying that the galleries are necessarily open on the day of a visit.
| By this point, the decorative arts no longer look like a side route. They look like one of the clearest ways to understand what the Louvre really contains. |
TIPS FOR THE DECORATIVE ARTS GALLERIES
A good visit to the decorative arts depends less on speed than on order. Once the sequence is right, the department becomes far easier to read.
Start with Napoleon III
Go first to the apartments of Napoleon III in the Richelieu wing. They are directly accessible from the Richelieu corridor in the Hall Napoléon and are usually at their quietest in the first hour after opening. Give the suite at least 30 to 45 minutes if you want the rooms to register as more than visual shock.
Starting here sets the tone for the rest of the department.
Look up in the Galerie d’Apollon
When you reach the Galerie d’Apollon, give the ceiling as much time as the jewel cases. Most visitors do the opposite. Delacroix’s ceiling is easiest to read from approximately the centre of the gallery, where the whole room begins to hold together.
The jewels reward attention. The room rewards patience.
Do not skip the Islamic Arts galleries
Even visitors with no prior interest in Islamic material culture should enter the galleries beneath the Cour Visconti. The Ricciotti-Bellini roof alone justifies the detour. In practice, however, the architecture almost always leads visitors back to the objects.
This is one of the best examples in the Louvre of a contemporary intervention that actually improves the reading of a collection.
Give medieval material real time
Finally, allow at least 30 minutes for the medieval applied arts rooms on the first floor of the Richelieu wing if enamels, goldsmiths’ work, or Gothic ivories interest you at all. These rooms are consistently under-attended relative to the quality of what they contain, and that often makes them among the most rewarding.
Quiet rooms are sometimes where the Louvre becomes most generous.
| The decorative arts do not ask for less attention than the museum’s famous departments. They simply reward a different kind of looking. |
Author’s note: This text was written with the intention of sharing and transmitting knowledge, not as an academic work. Its author is not a historian. Some details or interpretations may not reflect current historiographical consensus. For a rigorous approach, please refer to the sources listed at the end of this document
Références : Musée du Louvre, Les fastes du Second Empire ; Musée du Louvre, Du palais au musée : les appartements du ministre ; Musée du Louvre, Galerie d’Apollon ; Musée du Louvre, À la découverte des Arts de l’Islam – Cour Visconti ; Louvre Éditions / Librairie du Louvre, publications sur les objets d’art du Louvre.
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