Temporary Exhibitions at the Louvre

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID 

15 October 2025 - 26 January 2026
Hall Napoléon

Exhibition curators : Sébastien Allard, Senior Heritage Curator, Director of the Department of Paintings, and Côme Fabre, Curator, Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre 

To mark the bicentennial of his death, the Musée du Louvre is holding an exhibition devoted to the artistic career of the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). A project of such ambition could only be undertaken at the Louvre, which holds the largest existing collection of paintings and drawings by this significant French artist – including, first and foremost, his very large canvasses. The last exhibition of this scope was held at the Louvre in 1989.

Enhanced by research published in the meantime, the 2025 exhibition will present a new survey shedding light on David’s rich artistic, political and social journey. Indeed, more than simply an artist observing the times in which he lived, he sought to be a prominent social actor. During the period of turmoil that France experienced from 1770 to 1825, the painter’s importance was unmatched, both for his Europe-wide artistic influence, and for the high political and administrative offices he held in 1793 and 1794, for which he suffered the consequences until the end of his life, as a political exile.

It was no easy feat to remain in the highest spheres of influence during this period of political instability and artistic ferment. Driven by his astonishing energy, enduring confidence and keen awareness of his reputation, David experienced numerous setbacks followed by just as many comebacks, never losing sight of his rivals or his disciples. Always working simultaneously in his two fields of speciality – history painting and portraiture of his contemporaries – David moved forward with resolve during his lifetime, seeking to reveal the continuity between his historical present and heroic antiquity. In any event, he left a mark on our collective visual memory: to this day, we picture the great moments of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and imagine the society of that time, through the indelible and distorting filter of his paintings.

THE CARRACCI DRAWINGS:
THE MAKING OF THE GALLERIA FARNESE 

5 November 2025 - 2 February 2026
Mezzanine Napoléon

Exhibition curator: Victor Hundsbuckler, Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings, Musée du Louvre

The Palazzo Farnese, home to the French Embassy in Italy, holds a decorative work which, since its completion in the early 1600s, has been regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of Western painting, a Sistine Chapel for the 17th century that served as a model for numerous other decorative works across Europe for nearly 300 years. It is the gallery painted by Annibale Carracci, his brother Agostino, and their disciples.

To allow as many visitors as possible to appreciate its exquisite beauty, the Musée du Louvre is transporting the Galleria Farnese to Paris, so to speak – reassembling it as a ’puzzle’, using the most extraordinary collection ever put together of preparatory drawings for this decoration. The Galleria Farnese’s power to elicit admiration and inspire artists – for the Hall of Mirrors at the Château of Versailles and the Grand Foyer at the Opéra Garnier, for example – arises not only from its splendid frescoes, but from the beauty of these preparatory drawings. From quick sketches of the artist’s initial ideas, to cartoons measuring several metres per side with drawings scaled to the size of the fresco, the number of preserved drawings is unmatched by any other decorative work. Immediately coveted by the most knowledgeable collectors, these drawings quickly became veritable symbols of prestige and power dynamics. Today, the Musée du Louvre – which inherited the French royal collections – holds the world’s largest collection of these works together with the British Royal Collection, special partner of the exhibition.

The exhibition will thus recount the history of a true object of European fascination, also presenting for the very first time the freshly restored last vestiges of a replica of the Galleria Farnese commissioned by Louis XIV for the now-destroyed Tuileries Palace. A remarkable collection of very large cartoons produced by the earliest student artists-in-residence at the French Academy in Rome reveals the boundless admiration elicited by the Galleria Farnese through the sheer scale of this copying exercise. But looking beyond the fame of this masterpiece, which overshadows the artists who created it – the Carracci, considered collectively – the exhibition will seek to enhance visitors’ understanding of the fascinating figure of its chief master: Annibale Carracci. To do so, the exhibition design will feature an immersive recreation of not only the main Galleria ceiling, but a second ceiling as well: that of the Camerino, a small room entrusted to Annibale as a sort of ’trial run’. Following the drawings for the Galleria, those for the Camerino, displayed alongside other sheets produced by Annibale prior to his departure for Rome, will highlight the unrelenting quest for stylistic and intellectual renewal undertaken by the artist as a thirty-four-year-old newcomer to the Eternal City. The Galleria Farnese is indisputably Annibale’s masterpiece, his last great work, a model for posterity and an endless source of wonderment for all who come to admire its frescoes and drawings. It is at once an unrivalled achievement and the symbol of a tragedy – that of a still-young artist, driven to exhaustion, who would cease to paint after its completion and die shortly thereafter. 

THE MOULINS TRIPTYCH

26 November 2025 - 4 March 2026
Aile Richelieu, level 2, room 831

The Moulins Triptych by Jean Hey is an absolute masterpiece of French painting of the turn of the 16th century.

Its conservation treatment (2022–2025), initiated and led by the DRAC Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, and performed at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France (C2RMF) by conservators from the Atelier Tournillon, is a major event on the current French cultural heritage landscape. It has firstly provided crucial insight into French painting from the end of the 15th century, with the initial measures revealing the long-forgotten vivid colours of the three panels comprising the work. Secondly, this conservation treatment – and the accompanying in-depth research conducted by the C2RMF – have sparked new questions regarding the pictorial experimentations undertaken by the painter Jean Hey, known as the Master of Moulins, who trained in Flanders and is considered the most brilliant artist active in France in the late 15th century.

The completion of this fundamental conservation treatment, last performed on the work in 1879, is an opportunity for the Musée du Louvre, the DRAC Auvergne Rhône-Alpes and the C2RMF to hold an exceptional exhibition of the triptych in the immediate vicinity of the Louvre’s French painting galleries. Visitors will thus have the chance to share in this historic moment, and (re)discover Jean Hey’s masterpiece.

The showing of the triptych in Paris, where it was last exhibited in 1937, is a unique opportunity to display it alongside other works by Jean Hey held in Parisian institutions: five paintings and a drawing from the Musée du Louvre; the Virgin and Child with Four Angels from the Musée de Cluny, acquired in 2013; and the only miniature attributed to Hey (the frontispiece of the manuscript known as the Statutes of the Order of Saint Michael), from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Around this corpus, several painted panels – as well as drawings, illuminations and precious metal artefacts – will allow visitors to gain a better understanding of this masterpiece of French heritage, and of why it is such an exceptional example of Western art of the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.