Cour Marly, Cour Puget and Cour Khorsabad (Richelieu Wing, Louvre)

The Richelieu Wing, built under Napoleon III, housed the Ministry of Finance from 1871 to 1989, and its courtyards were then used as car parks. Once the ministry had moved to Bercy, the rooms went back to the museum and were inaugurated in 1993. Turning these three courtyards into glass-roofed sculpture courts was part of the second phase of the Grand Louvre.

When Ieoh Ming Pei and Michel Macary began modernising the Louvre, the courtyards were still open to the sky; the two architects decided to roof them over so that works could be shown there. Pei had chosen Macary and Jean-Michel Wilmotte to work with him on the Richelieu Wing; Macary was in charge of much of the ground floor, the two large courtyards, named Puget and Marly, among it.

Glass roofs cover the courtyards. Their aluminium framing filters the sunlight, and a system of aluminium sunshades regulates the light, the noise and the temperature. In the Cour Marly and the Cour Puget, stepped terraces show the works on several levels and open up varied perspectives.

The Cour Khorsabad, smaller, was roofed over as well. When the wing opened, it showed elements of the Assyrian palace after which it is named: a section reproduced from photographs of the layout recorded during the excavations, and a replica of a winged-bull relief from Khorsabad whose original is held in Chicago.

The Cour Marly and the Cour Puget hold French sculpture that was meant for outdoor settings. Works of the seventeenth century come from royal monuments, most of them since destroyed, which once stood in Paris squares such as the Place Vendôme and the Place des Victoires; those of the eighteenth century come from gardens; and the Cour Puget also surveys open-air statuary from the first half of the nineteenth century. The Marly Horses crown the Cour Marly, named after Louis XIV's pleasure residence, while the Cour Puget, which takes its name from the sculptor Pierre Puget, holds his Perseus and Andromeda and his Milo of Croton.

The three courtyards are inside the museum, in the Richelieu Wing, on the north side of the palace along the rue de Rivoli. To reach the Cour Puget, enter through that wing, go straight on to the vaulted hall, then turn right between the pillars.