Louvre

Established in 1793, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, france, originally included the royal collections and artifacts seized from émigré royalists and the church after the revolution. The museum’s collection (which included a large number of pieces derived from the Classical Roman and Greek cultures) was dramatically increased when art works looted from italy by the victorious French armies were sent back to Paris after 1794. Although many of these works were returned after Napoleon’s fall in 1815, the nucleus of the great museum called the Louvre was firmly established. Although it is justly famous for its collection of paintings, the Louvre also houses major collections of antiquities, particularly those drawn from the classical world, Egypt, and ancient Assyria.

The classical collection had its roots in the royal collections of François I and Henri IV, and it was supplemented by purchases of materials originally looted by the French armies. After 1815, the collection was expanded by donations (such as Venus de Milo in 1821), by purchase, and by pieces retrieved from excavations. The Egyptian collection has a long history as well. Founded by jean-francois champollion in 1827, the collection was greatly expanded through the efforts of French collectors and excavators in Egypt, the most notable being auguste mariette working at Saqqara. Of almost equal importance is the Assyrian collection founded in 1847, which is based around the work of paul-emile botta and Ernest Renan. Staff members of the Louvre continue to be active in archaeological research all over the world.

Tim Murray

References

Gould, C.H.M. 1965. Trophy of Conquest: The Musée Napoleon and the Creation of the Louvre. London: Faber.

Lozar, Rajko

(1904–1985)

The Slovenian archaeologist, ethnographer, and art historian Rajko Lozar graduated in art history and classical archaeology from Ljubljana University in 1925 and received his Ph.D. in Roman provincial archaeology in Vienna in 1927. Between 1928 and 1940, he was curator of archaeology in the National Museum in Ljubljana, in 1940–1945, he was director of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana, and in 1941–1942, he was a lecturer in prehistory at the University of Ljubljana. After 1945, he migrated first to Austria and then, in 1950, to the United States where he was director of the Rahr Civic Center and Public Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, between 1956 and 1969.

Lozar was predominant in Slovenian archaeology in the period between the two world wars, mainly owing to the fact that he was the only professional archaeologist in slovenia at the time. This research and museum work encompassed archaeology, art history, and ethnography as well as the protection of cultural monuments and university teaching. As a scholar with a background in Classical and humanist sciences, he was influenced by the culture-history approach in central European archaeology during the first decades of the twentieth century. He applied the specific approach that he had developed first as an art historian to his archaeological studies in prehistory, to the Roman and early medieval archaeology of Slovenia, and to the study of the evolution of style and key forms. He partly ignored typological studies based on discretely delimited units and contexts, considering form as the general expression and synthesis of individual and local cultural development, not as a manifestation of the spiritual culture only. His major works in this area are “Ornamenti noriskopanonske kamnoseske industrije” (1934a; Ornaments of the Norico-Pannonian Stonecutting Industry), “Predzgodovina Slovenije, posebej Kranjske, v luci zbirke Mecklenburg” (1934b; Prehistory of Slovenia, especially Carniola, in the Light of Mecklenburg Collection), and “Studija o ljubljanski keramiki” (1941b; Study of Pottery from the Late Copper Age Sites in Ljubljana Marsh).

He was also one of the pioneers of early Slavic archaeology in Slovenia. His study on Slavonic pottery, “Staroslovansko in srednjevesko loncarstvo v Sloveniji” (1938; Early Slavic and Medieval Potmaking in Slovenia), was the first attempt at a chronological and typological