Iconoclasm—that is the opening idea of the Galerie du Temps at the Louvre-Lens, the decade-old branch of the Louvre museum in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. Immediately upon entering the gallery’s massive room, one is confronted by a large installation of fifteen photographs, a panorama of dun-colored cliffs that rise from scattered dwellings at their base to a mountain peak above. Noticeable are two caverns, negative spaces so large that they dominate the landscape: one is 173 feet tall (nearly sixteen stories), completely black, the other 124 feet tall (eleven stories). The sunlight shines on something tarpaulin-covered at their bases. Underneath these covers are all that remains of two Buddhas, hewn from the rock in the sixth century A.D. In March 2001, the Taliban packed dynamite into these caverns and blasted the gods to pieces. I was in the U.S. military at the time and I remember hearing of this act, proof of Taliban barbarism. Sixteen years later, the French ambassador to Afghanistan asked Pascal Convert to photograph the cliffs of Bamiyan. Their goal was to conserve digitally both the cliffs themselves and the destruction that had taken place there.
The panorama is the first of the gallery’s more than two hundred works of art, all drawn from the Louvre’s collection. As the panel at the entrance states, this collection spans an enormous range, dating “from the invention of writing in the fourth millennium B.C. to the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century.” The pieces are grouped by geographic location, and within those groupings the pieces are ordered chronologically. The gallery thus feels historically comprehensive.
The organization reveals many similarities otherwise difficult to see. One of the oldest works in the collection is the statue of Gudea, a prince of the city-state of Lagash in ancient Mesopotamia, carved from a dark piece of diorite rock and dated to the twenty-second century B.C. Feet together, hands clasped on his chest, Gudea is dressed in a simple fabric and a small cap, signs of his piety. Across the room, Blanche de Champagne, a thirteenth-century Frenchwoman, appears in much the same manner. This noblewoman, her likeness wrought from panels of copper hammered onto walnut around 1306, is also simply dressed in a single piece of fabric and a bonnet, her feet together, her hands clasped in prayer. Gudea and Blanche, nobles from different continents and different millennia, emerge from the mists of time in nearly the same posture and dressed with the same humility.
Another striking similarity across place and time involves Raphael’s Portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, Vice-Queen of Naples (1509–22). The vice-queen conveys a quiet tension. She sits slightly aslant to the viewer, positioned so one shoulder is visible and the other obscured, and she gestures obliquely to another room in the background as if she is refusing to disclose herself. The broad brim of a red velvet cap grants her a kind of halo, and her voluminous sleeves and gown of the same color speak to her dignified sensuousness. The finery of her dress, the style of portraiture, and her pose is mirrored in Bahram Kirmanshahi’s Portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah (1857–58), depicting the ruler of the distant Qajar dynasty of Persia who lived from 1831 to 1896. Both works convey wealth and languor, the way that the duties of state beautify yet restrict the body—in thick shining robes in the case of the princess and in pearls and embroidery in the case of the Shah.
Most interesting in the gallery for me, however, were the signs of developing traditions. Consider Discophoros, or “discus-bearer.” This is a Roman sculpture in marble from the fourth or fifth century A.D., a copy of a fifth-century B.C. bronze by the Greek sculptor Naucydes, in which a man—naked, muscular, with feet apart—cups a discus in his left hand. His other hand is half-extended, just above his waist, half-closed or half-open, a position of uncertainty. Is he counting something? Or preparing to splay his fingers, to whirl about and throw his discus as in the famous Discobolus of Myron? The sense of uncertainty is heightened by his expression: his face is downcast, looking beyond his feet, his mouth gently closed, his jaw easy. In other words, this muscular athlete, ready for competition, is lost in thought. A man of action stilled by his mind, he hesitates. And this creates a sense of intimacy, as if by pausing long enough, one might hear him muttering to himself and join in his ruminations.
Just beyond this athlete is Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods, represented in a marble sculpture from about 150 A.D. His stance is similar, his feet apart, his weight shifted to one side contrapposto-style. With rippling musculature he reaches out with one arm while the other falls to his hips. He clasps not a discus but a lightning bolt. Like the discus thrower, he is naked from the front. But unlike the sculpture’s Greek forebear, he has a cloth draped over his back, a kind of cape. A further change is that Jupiter, as the Romans expected of the gods, is bearded. His face is upturned and portentous, though somewhat empty. Jupiter appears on duty, ready for veneration, a god-king fully exposed.
Another depiction of the divine or the ideal is nearby in the statue of Marcus Aurelius, dated from about 160 A.D. His face is nearly identical: calm and bearded, he too looks straight ahead. He holds the same contrapposto pose as the discus thrower and Jupiter before him, but his outstretched hand reaches toward an invisible audience—this ruler’s source of power is not a god’s lightning bolt but his control of the crowd. These three figures, considered chronologically, thus show an evolving sense of the way sculpture communicates complex expressions, beliefs, and ideas. There is a spiritual progression as well. The good athlete, a figure of admiration, turns into a mythical king of the gods who then becomes a historical king that thought himself a god. Marcus Aurelius, a stoic, believed that a good man “is in some way a priest and minister of the gods. He responds to the divinity seated within him” (Meditations, 3.4.3).
Christianity’s emergence subverts these aesthetic and spiritual trends, though the religion preserves aspects of ancient Greek and Roman culture. The first work of Christian origin in the gallery is in fact a tombstone inscribed with Greek and Latin. Near the top are the Greek letters, XP, the start of the name ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, or Christ, the mark of a Christian. Below, there is an epigram in Latin, which reads, in part, fidelis in pace vixit (one of the faithful who lived in peace). The slab, displayed upright so that the reverse can be shown, also testifies to a different faith. The underside contains a portion of a large carving representing Egyptian gods and goddesses. Certainly, this reappropriation is more subtle than the dynamite of Bamiyan, but these early Christians still practiced an iconoclasm of their own. To declare the new and greatest god, the old gods were cut up and buried.
The Christian adaptation of its pagan inheritance is also evident in the way God is represented. In a fragment from a decoration in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Chaumont-en-Bassigny, France, there is a figure very much like the discus-bearer, Jupiter, and Marcus Aurelius: he rests one hand on something below and offers his other hand upwards. Now, however, the downward hand does not hold a weapon but a book. And his upturned hand is not holding a staff or gesturing to a crowd: it shows two fingers and his thumb, indicating the Holy Trinity. Carved into limestone at the end of the fifteenth century, this bearded man is a depiction of God the Father.
Another imprint of Christianity on man’s image is found in a relief of marble from the Church of St. Eustache in Paris, The Placing of Christ in the Tomb, dating from 1540 to 1560. The composition features nine people, some distracted, some participating in the lowering of Christ into what appears to be a stone coffin. Noticeably, Christ is just as muscular as the discus-bearer and nearly as naked—he is exposed save for a shroud so thin that his chest muscles and ribs are clearly seen beneath it—but unlike his ancient or even medieval forbears he is shown here as a man who, despite his strength and divinity, is dead. His hands are empty, his eyes closed. A woman is kneeling beside him, kissing one of his pierced wrists. He does not need to hold a weapon or even to stand to receive veneration.
Islam takes a different course in its religious art, and the Galerie du Temps reveals this contrast between East and West. For while the human form, particularly the naked human form, remains a primary subject in Western art, it disappears almost entirely in the East. The sculpture of Gudea, along with Egyptian sculptures and paintings of gods, servants, and soldiers, suddenly gives way to decorative work of an abstract nature. Take, for instance, the exquisite cream-colored pottery with blue or brown decorative detail from Susa in Iran and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. There are also two panels of geometric designs dating from the fifteenth century A.D. in acacia wood inlaid with ivory, illustrative of the Mamluk style, as well as ornate materials for daily use such as a chandelier piece, a vase, and a copper ewer.
Yet the greatest contest depicted in the gallery is not one between the East and West but within the West itself. Far against the back wall of the gallery rests the collection’s final painting. Larger than life, a man rides his horse, one hand resting on his saddle, the other, characteristically, thrust inside his shirt. Once his face is recognized it becomes impossible not to look back at him continually, his horse ambling closer. Yet when he arrives, the horse turns out to be a mule, and his hand on the saddle is empty, not even holding the reins. One of his soldiers, walking alongside, is clutching the mule’s mane, leading the way through a snowy mountain pass. Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at the Grand-Saint-Bernard Pass in 1800 was painted by Paul Delaroche in 1848 long after the event to update the earlier and more glamorized version by Jacques-Louis David. The Delaroche, in other words, is like the panoramic of the Bamiyan cliffs: an attempt to conserve the past, not destroy it.
Indeed, such would appear the aim of the Galerie du Temps. Given the iconoclasm that recently has come to characterize the Anglosphere and the fact that the Bamiyan cliffs are once more under Taliban control, this museum leaves a lasting impression. The number of astonishing works in such an intimate and excellently curated space easily repays several viewings.