Search the online inventory of the Louvre’s Department of Graphic Arts for Charles Le Brun, court painter to Louis XIV, and no fewer than 3,181 records will appear. Scrolling through studies of rabbits and dromedaries, designs for friezes and fountains, and elaborate mythological and religious scenes, you will gain an appreciation not only for Le Brun’s prolific career but also for the challenge of paring down the Louvre’s collections—some 400,000 items in all—to a few hundred representative works.
    This very challenge was taken up by the organizers of “Louvre Atlanta,” which kicks off this fall at the High Museum of Art. For the next three years, one building of the High’s recently inaugurated expansion, designed by Renzo Piano, will be transformed into an outpost of the venerable French institution. A series of long-term, thematic exhibitions will showcase masterpieces of painting, sculpture and drawing, as well as decorative arts and antiquities, many never before seen in the U.S.
    The project was the brainchild of the two museums’ directors, Henri Loyrette and Michael Shapiro, who collaborated on two Impressionist shows when Loyrette was director of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. Since joining the Louvre in 2001, Loyrette has sought to modernize the state-owned museum in a number of ways, not least by dramatically increasing its private funding. More than a third of the estimated $18 million budget for “Louvre Atlanta,” provided by the High’s private and corporate sponsors, will go toward the restoration of the Louvre’s 18th-century French decorative arts galleries.
    Yet Loyrette’s motives are not purely financial. Another of his missions is to broaden his museum’s cultural reach. The most dramatic case in point is the Louvre-Lens, an offshoot of the museum slated to open in a depressed former mining town in northern France in 2009. The High, meanwhile, represents what Loyrette has referred to as “the new artistic map of the U.S.,” which goes well beyond the major cities that have long dominated the cultural scene.
    A new map calls for a new approach, and one of Loyrette’s fundamental parameters for “Louvre Atlanta” was that it extend beyond the standard three-month time frame of a special exhibition. “He didn’t want just a brief contact between a couple of curators and the museum directors, but a deeper engagement between the staffs of the two museums,” explains David Brenneman, chief curator of the High and co-managing curator of the project.
    Accordingly, “Louvre Atlanta” will feature three 10-month exhibitions—one each year—along with shorter companion shows. The overarching theme will be the history of the Louvre, which opened as a museum in 1793, on the first anniversary of the birth of the French Republic. It represented a triumph for the Revolutionaries, who had seized the royal collections, making them biens nationaux and putting them on view for the public in what was now the people’s palace.
    Year one of “Louvre Atlanta” will focus on the genesis of these collections, when the Louvre was still a royal palace. The main show, “Kings as Collectors,” will consist primarily of works commissioned or collected by Louis XIV and Louis XVI. Among the 32 paintings, sculptures and antiquities displayed will be one of the Louvre’s most celebrated works, Raphael’s portrait of the writer and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione, best known as the author of The Book of the Courtier, the definitive guide to aristocratic conduct in the 16th century. “Raphael was held up by the Royal Academy in France as the exemplar par excellence,” explains Brenneman. “The royal collections tended to reflect that, and so the Louvre now has one of the best collections of Raphaels in the world.”
    The artist and his subject were good friends, and part of the portrait’s appeal is its intimate quality. It hung in Castiglione’s home in Mantua, and he even wrote a poem in which his wife and son commune with it while he is away on a diplomatic mission. It remained in his possession until his death, then eventually made its way into Louis XIV’s collection. Since then, it has left France just once.
    The painting is considered such an integral part of the Louvre that it will remain in Atlanta for only three months. It will then be replaced by a completely different yet equally iconic work, Nicolas Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia Ego” (1638-40), an archetype of French classicism. The canvas shows three idealized shepherds and a female companion gathered around a tomb in a bucolic setting, reading the title inscription, which has been interpreted to mean both “I [Death] reign even in Arcadia” and “I [the deceased] too lived in Arcadia.” The artist apparently based this memento mori on an earlier painting by Guercino in which a skull figures prominently. Poussin’s subtler equivalent, according to some, is the scythe-shaped shadow cast on the tomb by one of the shepherd’s arms.
    Another work likely to strike many viewers as familiar is Velásquez’s 1653 portrait of the Infanta Margarita, the central figure in the artist’s most famous painting, “Las Meninas,” which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The portrait was commissioned by Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV. “She was the sister of Philip IV of Spain, and she basically wanted to have a family photo album of her Spanish nieces and nephews,” explains Brenneman. “Philip IV commissioned Velásquez to paint some 30 portraits, and they all hung in the royal bathrooms in the Louvre. They were dispersed during the French Revolution, and this is the only one that the Louvre retained.”
    Rembrandt, Murillo, Reni and Fragonard are just a few of the other artists represented in “Kings as Collectors,” and the bar is set equally high for the first companion show, “The King’s Drawings,” which opens concurrently. “Each sheet is absolutely exquisite,” says Brenneman. “If we had just one of these in our collection, it would be a major icon of our museum.”
    The versatile Charles Le Brun gets his due with no fewer than eight works, including one showing “Louis XIV Re-establishing Commerce” (1674-1679), a design for a ceiling decoration at Versailles that serves as a reminder of one of art’s primary roles under the Ancien Régime: to glorify the king. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a charming Watteau in which chalk studies of hands and a man’s head are combined, almost doodle-like, with drawings of two cats.
    The drawings will be rotated out in January to make way for “Decorative Arts of the Kings,” which will feature furniture, silver, porcelain and other items commissioned for the courts of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. One of the most fascinating pieces in this show is a nécessaire given by Louis XV to Queen Marie Leczinska upon the birth of the Dauphin in 1729. A royal take on the camping kit, it comprises nearly 30 pieces including a vermeil chocolate pot, burner, creamer, funnel, sieve, candlestick, bell, porcelain cups and saucers, and an ebony frother—all packed in a rosewood box. Upon the queen’s death, it was bequeathed to her lady-in-waiting, in keeping with court custom, and thus escaped destruction during the French Revolution.
    Year two of “Louvre Atlanta”—entitled “The Louvre and the Ancient World”—will tackle the Napoleonic era and the Enlightenment, with a focus on the museum’s Egyptian, Near Eastern and Greco-Roman antiquities. “The Louvre played an incredibly important role in the history of archaeology in the 19th century, which was driven in large part by scholars wanting to verify biblical history,” says Brenneman. “One of them was the brilliant Egyptologist Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. He was the Louvre’s first curator of Egyptian art. And by the end of the 19th century, the Louvre was undertaking major excavations in what we now call the Middle East.”
    One exhibition under development, “The Eye of Josephine,” will center on a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities that the Empress received as a gift from the King of Naples and then installed at Malmaison, her château outside Paris. “These works played a major role not only in terms of creating a taste for the antique but also in terms of creating what we now call Empire Style,” explains Brenneman. The objects were dispersed after Josephine died and then made their way one by one to the Louvre. This will be the first time that the Louvre has reassembled the collection.
    In keeping with Henri Loyrette’s forward-thinking approach, “Louvre Atlanta” will conclude by examining “The Louvre of Today and Tomorrow,” exploring the impact of the Louvre’s collections on contemporary art.
    The relatively intimate scale of “Louvre Atlanta” may well be a case of less is more. “I hope visitors will be allowed to discover works of art that they might not notice even if they visited the Louvre, because of the overwhelming aspect of the Louvre experience—the profusion of masterpieces that can leave you sort of fatigued,” says David Brenneman. “Our experience here will be one where people will really be able to focus on individual objects. I hope that is delightful—and surprising.”
“Kings as Collectors” runs from Oct. 14 through Sept. 2, 2007; “The King’s Drawings,” from Oct. 14 through Jan. 28, 2007; and “Decorative Arts of the Kings” from March 3 through Sept. 2, 2007. For further details on “Louvre Atlanta,” visit high.org.