Museum opening of the year: Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, Paris

A three-year restoration has not solitary transformed the Galerie d'Apollon, writes Samson Spanier: it has revealed unexpect harmonies in this great gallery's composite ensemble of paintings, sculpture and tapestries.

scarcely any 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 sculpt figures and forty-one paintings. The last range above 200 years, from Charles Le Brun's Triumph of Neptune (1664) to Eugene Delacroix's Triumph of Apollo (1851) Commissioned through Louis XIV in the 1660 the gallery's iconographic programme through Le Brun allegorises the orb of day King as Apollo in a scheme that was not complet until the nineteenth hundred under the architect Felix Duban.

The reopening of the Galerie d'Apollon after restoration last winter revealed a transformation (Fig. 1) The compass had suffered from centuries of humidity and water damage (it view from aboves the Seine), affecting all its constituents from the stucco sculptures to the paintings. Previous restorations, especially in the early twentieth hundred had done more harm than profitable The work, which was undertaken by the agency of sixty experts, from scientists and engineers to art historians and painters, took four years and take away from 5.2 million [euro]; it was sponsored through petroleum company Total.

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statuarys that were grey are now creamy white (Fig. 3) A statuary of Polyhymnia has regained a missing hand; other figures have regenerated fingers and toes. Paintings that sagged have been reattached to the walls. Louis-Jacques Durameau's Summer (1774) used to go through from two vertical cracks that ran the filled height of the canvas, on the contrary now it is proudly unblemished. The gilded made of wood carvings around the windows had make go rounded brown, but now they gleam.

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There is more to this restoration than plugging cracks and regilding: the quality of the decoration is a revelation, now that it can be seen suitably for the first time. Now it is possible to appreciate on what account Charles Le Brun was appointed court painter (Fig. 2) Following the removal of repainting in his Neptune the liveliness of the horses (see Fig. 3) animates the entire composition. The reputation of the minor painters also benefits. After the removal of orange overpaint, Dawn (1850-51) through Charles-Louis Muller now boasts delicate pinks and bleached tones, as befits the first jiffys of day.

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Delacroix's twelve-metre-wide Triumph of Apollo (Fig. 4) was especially in ne of care, having been damaged by means of water in the 1860s, and remov and turned up during World War II. Over-zealous restorers in the 1940 added a dark varnish to hide the damage and possibly to harmonise its contrasts and saturated colours with the Le Brun Now that this varnish has been remov Apollo rides his chariot in forehead of a bright yellow-orange day-star that burns out towards the quiescence of the room. Delightfully shocking to my organ of visions the colour is a reminder of Delacroix's status the couple as a Romantic and as an influence upon later colour theorists, such as Paul Signac.

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The removal of the varnish has also revealed just by what means skilful a craftsman Delacroix was. Since the latitude is lit by windows from single side only, the ceiling paintings are inevitably brighter upon one half. Delacroix used darker colours for more powerfully lit parts, such as the clouds--so that the windows' light neutralises the contrast and creates a unified composition.

This is individual of several major discoveries that demonstrate in what way the room's restoration was a dynamic proces of art-historical research, with implications for subsequent time scholarship. For example, it had previously been contemplation that the room's panelling was all replaced in the nineteenth hundred but close study of it, combined with archival research into carpenters' bills for restorations, revealed that almost half the seventeenth-century panelling survives.

As well as the challenge of the restoration of individual constitutings the conservators also had the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of maintaining the room's visual unity. The gilding, for example, has been mut in the way that as not to clash with Le Brun's irreversibly aged paintings. The canvases, in make go round have been covered with an unreflective varnish with equal reason that the sculptures are not eclipsed. The guiding principle was the decision to get back the room to its appearance after the previous major restoration, that of Duban in 1848-51 As the novel restorers observe, Duban's additions, which included the commissioning of Delacroix, are a 'creative act' and should not be expung The reverence for Duban's work was enhanced by the agency of the fact that he and the artists who worked beneath him are revealed to have conscientiously complet the play in the unifying spirit of Le Brun This is greatest in quantity notable in the new faculty of perception of a journey across the paintings, from dawn to bright daylight to night, revealed after the removal of the dark varnishes upon the canvases by Muller and Delacroix. Moreover, assonances of colour are now apparent, for instance the unifying red of Le Brun and Muller The sweep has not seemed so coherent for a hundred As Genevieve Bresc-Bautier, the curator of statuary at the Louvre, says, 'although the works face each other, there is a dialogue between them'.