Louvre Atlanta: An 'Eye' for the 'Ancient'

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Two-hundred thousand visitors later, it's a year since Louvre Atlanta opened at the High Museum of Art.

The second of three planned main exhibitions opened Tuesday and is called "The Louvre and the Ancient World." It is accompanied by the first of two complementary exhibitions, "The Eye of Josephine."

Together, the shows bring more than 130 artworks from the Louvre in Paris, France, to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

Louvre Atlanta is the ambitious, unprecedented arrangement of the two museums' directors, the Louvre's Henri Loyrette and the High's Michael Shapiro.

The deal has allowed as many as 40,000 American schoolchildren to see treasures with a convenience that had been reserved for their young French counterparts.

This fall, the first piece they'll see on arrival at the High is a 7-ton work in marble so revered that Michelangelo himself is said to have seen it, considered it and surely been inspired by it. See a gallery of images of key pieces in the "Ancient World" and "Eye of Josephine" exhibitions »

"The Tiber" was created in the first century A.D. by a sculptor whose identity is lost in antiquity. This piece hasn't even been on display at the Louvre for years. It represents the Tiber River, ancient Rome's lifeline to the sea, and was paired in its original state with "The Nile," another river-god-in-stone for the Temple of the Egyptian god Serapis. Watch the Louvre's Isabelle Lemaistre go over key points of "The Tiber" in Atlanta »

By arrangement with post-Napoleonic Paris, "The Tiber" remained at the Louvre and "The Nile" went to the Vatican.

And in terminology that only a museum of the Louvre's stature might risk, this is called a "restoration." Bits of it were expertly restored in the 16th century when "The Tiber" was discovered buried in Rome.

Now it has been given a special contemporary cleanup by the Louvre through direct gifts of the Prince d'Arenberg and international pipe manufacturer Victaulic of Easton, Pennsylvania. After Atlanta-area viewers have gazed at it this year, it will return to Paris to be placed on display at the Louvre.

"The Louvre and the Ancient World" and its sister show opened Tuesday. As with last year's pattern, the key exhibition, "Ancient World," is on view for nearly a year, until September 7, 2008.

"The Eye of Josephine," a reunion of some 60 antiquities collected by the Empress Josephine for Malmaison, her residence near Paris, runs until May 18, 2008. It is to be replaced by "Houdon at the Louvre: Portrait Busts and Sculpture" with some 20 pieces from the era of the French Enlightenment of the mid-1700s.

Louvre Atlanta's three-year program is expected to cost $18 million. Much of that comes from High board member Anne Cox Chambers and corporate patrons Accenture, UPS, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, AXA Art Insurance and Turner Broadcasting, parent of CNN.com.

The price includes some €5.5 million for restoration work on the Louvre's 18th-century French decorative arts galleries. E-mail to a friend

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