The Louvre Museum announced on Monday the closure to the public “for as long as necessary” of the Campana Gallery, which houses nine rooms dedicated to Greek ceramics, due to the “fragility of some beams” of the building in the south wing, the Sully, it said in a statement. In another of the galleries in this area of the museum, the unusual theft of Napoleon’s eight jewels occurred a month ago, perpetrated by four men who accessed the Apollo Gallery, where the stolen pieces were located, by climbing a staircase.
The closure of the Galleria Campana takes place “as a precaution” until the problem is analysed. “Within the so-called Sully complex, the second floor has been under special surveillance for several years,” the art gallery said in a statement.
He justifies his decision in the conclusions of a report from a technical consultancy firm, communicated to them last Friday: “Given the complex architectural concept and the structural and improvement works carried out in 1930, the attics of the second floor of the wing present deficiencies.” The space houses the offices of 65 museum workers, who will have to leave the facilities before Wednesday.
The closure aggravates the controversy after the theft of the Crown jewels and after the publication of a devastating report by the French Court of Auditors, which criticizes the management carried out by the museum’s leaders between 2018 and 2024. The organization denounced that the art gallery had favored the purchase of works of art over investments in the maintenance and renovation of its structures.
The Museum is now under the microscope. Since the theft occurred, its president, Laurence de Cars, has defended himself, claiming that he was aware of the building’s security shortcomings and that, therefore, additional security cameras would be installed between 2023 and 2025. He also criticized the harshness of the Court’s report.
The Galleria Campana is named after the Italian marquis Giampietro Campana, who owned one of the largest private collections of ceramics in Europe. Arrested in 1857 for embezzlement, his collection was confiscated and put up for sale. Napoleon III took part in it, today exhibited in this gallery of the Louvre, inaugurated in 1863.
In the Sully wing, to the south, the theft of Napoleon’s jewels took place on 19 October. In broad daylight, a commando of four men climbed a ladder to the balcony that gives access to the Apolo Gallery and, armed with radials, broke the windows where these pieces were located, took them away and left them where they had entered. A robbery that lasted seven minutes.
A week later some members of the commando were arrested (there are currently four people in prison), but the jewels, valued at 88 million euros but with an incalculable patrimonial value, have still not appeared. It is suspected that they may have been dismantled, to melt down the precious metals and sell them separately.
At the center of the controversy, the president of the Louvre appeared before the Senate and also gave an account a week ago before an extraordinary board of directors in which she announced a strengthening of security measures. He will appear before the National Assembly’s cultural affairs committee on Wednesday.
Laurence des Cars, who took over the reins of the art gallery in 2021, justifies having already alerted the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, about the state of deterioration of some areas of the museum and “the multiplication of damage in some already very degraded spaces”. Shortly thereafter, President Emmanuel Macron announced a renovation and modernization project, which includes the Sully space. The Louvre is the largest museum in the world and the most visited, with almost nine million visitors each year.
