Louvre Museum

Model-turned-French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, actress Catherine Deneuve and the shah of Iran's widow were among mourners Thursday at the Paris funeral of legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent. Applause rose among the arriving guests as Saint Laurent's casket was carried into the flower-bedecked Saint Roch church near the Louvre Museum and Tuileries Gardens and placed before the altar, draped in a decorated yellow cloth. Saint Laurent was among the most influential designers during the most important era of Parisian fashion, changing the way generations of women dressed, most enduringly by making it glamorous and feminine to wear pants.

One of the last intact pieces of the French crown jewels that were sold off by the republican government in the 19th century returned to France this week after being acquired by the Louvre Museum. The museum paid $10.7 million for the bow brooch, made up of 2,634 diamonds. It was created by Parisian jeweler Francois Kramer for Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, in 1855. In 1887, it was sold by order of the Third Republic. It was bought for New York socialite Caroline Astor and remained in the family for more than a century.

The Louvre Museum has acquired a diamond-encrusted brooch that is among the few intact pieces of the crown jewels once worn by French royals. The Louvre said Tuesday that it paid $10.7 million for the brooch at auction on Friday from unidentified owners in the United States, where the brooch had been since 1887 -- the year when many of the crown jewels were sold off. Shaped like a bow, the brooch features two dangling tassels and 2,634 pink and...

PARIS -- Signs ask visitors to keep their hands off the art in the Louvre Museum. But one special sculpture gallery invites art lovers to indulge. The Louvre's Tactile Gallery, targeted to the blind and visually impaired, is the only space in the Paris museum where visitors can touch the sculptures, with no guards or alarms to stop them. Its latest exhibit is a crowd-pleaser: a menagerie of sculpted lions, snakes, horses and eagles.

France's storied Louvre museum, home to priceless art works such as the "Mona Lisa," said Tuesday it would open a new Louvre in the Persian Gulf boomtown of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, prompting outcries from some who accuse the museum of shilling France's patrimony for $1.3 billion in oil money. The 30-year agreement opens the way for the Louvre Abu Dhabi to display thousands of works from the Paris Louvre and other leading French museums.

The Louvre Museum had a record number of visitors in 2006, thanks to dynamic Friday-night programming, successful temporary exhibits and a lecture series by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, the Paris museum said. About 8.3 million people visited the museum in 2006, compared with 7.5 million the previous year, the museum said in a statement. Attendance has increased steadily over the last few years.

A few days after opening the first exhibit in a three-year partnership with the Louvre in Paris, the High Museum in Atlanta announced that it will be the first of three stops in the United States for an iconic masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance that has never left Florence. Three panels from the eastern doors of the Baptistery, called "Gates of Paradise," will be on view starting April 28.

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century masterpiece, is in fragile condition but should not suffer too much damage if taken care of properly, experts who studied the painting closely said Tuesday. Scientists from Canada's National Research Council used special three-dimensional technology to examine both sides of the masterpiece, which was painted at some stage between 1503 and 1506 and now sits in the Louvre museum in Paris.

More than 30 works from the venerable Musee du Louvre -- including two of the Paris institution's masterpieces, Raphael's "Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione" and Nicolas Poussin's "Et in Arcadia Ego" -- can be seen Oct. 14 through Sept. 7, 2007, at the High Museum of Atlanta. The long-term loan launches a partnership, announced earlier this year, that will bring hundreds of works owned by the Louvre to the High in return for an undisclosed sum.

A10-year project to restore the Musee des Arts Decoratifs on the northwest side of the Louvre has finally borne fruit. The museum, closed to visitors since 1995, was scheduled to reopen Sept. 15. Its collection of decorative arts -- 150,000 objets d'art covering French style from the Middle Ages to the present and contemporary design worldwide -- is considered comparable to that of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.