From all corners of the WorldThe Gallery of Five Continents

Built under the Second Empire by Hector Lefuel to hold parliamentary sessions, the Pavillon des Sessions was converted into the Gallery of Five Continents in 2025. Its spacious, light-filled rooms, with streamlined architecture designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, are the setting for a dialogue between global cultures which transcends borders and eras.

Masterpieces of the world

The Gallery of Five Continents is the result of the partnership between the Louvre and the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and offers a fresh approach to museography, aimed at fostering discourse between artworks, cultures and time periods. The selection of objects on display reflects the diversity of the French public museum collections. Brought together on an equal footing, works from the Louvre, the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, the Musée Guimet – French National Museum of Asian Arts, the French National Maritime Museum, the French National Library, the Museum of Aquitaine and the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer are rounded out by an exceptional loan from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Together, these artworks present millennia of human creation.

Masterpieces are born free and equal

Hailing from five continents, these artworks have made their way to the Louvre by various means. Some pieces were always intended to be collected and displayed as artworks while others were initially used for a host of other purposes before arriving in a museum: privately owned or designed for public use, these objects served as devotional, ceremonial or ritualistic objects; as symbols of power, prestige or authority; or as architectural elements.
Their multifarious journeys reflect the long and complex history of how objects travelled to, and within, Europe. Museums do their best to recreate the paths these works have taken based on the sources available to them and current research.

Cultures in dialogue

The collection highlights connections between various works and the cultures and continents that they belong to, evoking themes fundamental to human existence: birth, death, belief, authority, prestige, fate, understanding the world, appeasing nature, and passing through worlds.

The Gallery of Five Continents explores the diversity of representations, functions and values associated with the objects on display, thereby highlighting the power attributed to them by different civilisations and societies throughout the course of history. As we explore the common threads, perspectives and similarities which tie these works together, a tapestry of global connections emerges.

Masterpieces

Anthropomorphic sculpture 'Trrou Körrou' (known as 'the Blue Man')

Cultures in dialogue

Maternity Figure / Virgin and Child

A Dogon maternity figure and a Spanish Virgin and Child hold different meanings and functions, though they may be contemporaneous. Yet in Africa as in Europe, these two sculpture types of a mother holding her child in her lap are expressions of the shared concepts of protection, lineage and legacy.

Maternity figure
Attributed to the ‘Master of Tintam’
Tintam region, Mali
14th century
Wood, pigments
Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, 70.1999.9.3
Purchased on site by Maurice Nicaud in 1954
Former collection of Hubert Goldet
Gift in lieu, 1999.

The subject of maternity is closely linked to fertility and offspring. This female figure wears a labret in her lower lip. Her leg is frozen mid-movement as she adjusts the baby’s position in her lap. The crocodile carved onto the base of her seat evokes a clan or lineage.
The red colour of the figure, which comes from ochre, is characteristic of a group of ancient sculptures from the Tintam region.

Virgin and Child
Aragon, Spain
About 1300
Polychromed wood (modern polychrome)
Musée du Louvre, Department of Sculptures, RF 2015-2
Purchased 2015. Morata de Jalón (Valdejalón comarca, Zaragoza Province, Aragon?); part of the collection of Ernest Rupin (1845–1909) since 1896; sale, Paris, R.-G. Boisgirard, 1 April 1960; sale, Paris, R. Le Fur et associés, 26 November 2014; Galerie Gabrielle Laroche and Galerie Bresset.

In statues that portray the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, the emphasis is often placed on the emotional bond that ties together mother and child, just as it does in any family. However, certain symbolic elements render this particular depiction more complex. The Virgin Mary is holding a rose and the Christ Child reaches out to touch one of the petals. The flower and the gesture allude to the Passion of Christ which lies in Jesus’s future, foreshadowing the sufferings of mother and child.

Aelius Caesar / Turu kuru grade figure

Authority is exercised by giving commands and receiving obeisance. Through the centuries, societies have created forms, objects and imagery that allowed them to legitimise authority, but also to give it limits or to challenge it. The statue of Aelius Caesar or the Vanuatu ‘Blue Man’ signal established power and high positions on the social ladder.

Aelius Caesar
Cumae (?), Italy
AD 136–138
Marble
Paris, Musée du Louvre, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Ma 1167
Purchased 1861. Formerly part of the collection of the Marquis Campana.
This statue is from the collection of the Marquis Giampietro Campana (1808–1880), a 19th-century Italian banker who amassed a large collection of ancient objects. Campana’s fortune funded his purchasing of artworks uncovered during excavations and bought on the art market. After he was convicted of embezzlement, his collection was seized. Part of his collection was acquired by Napoleon III (reigned 1852–1870) and sent to the Louvre in 1862.

Adopted by Emperor Hadrian as his intended successor in AD 136, Senator Lucius Aelius Caesar died suddenly in AD 138. This portrait sculpture shows him half-clothed, and uses a pose and anatomical style borrowed from Greek statuary. His left shoulder and the bottom section of his body are covered by a long paludamentum (military cloak). This manner of depiction, which puts the idealised physical form on display, is an expression of power. This statue must have been sculpted during the period when Aelius Caesar grew close with the emperor, or shortly after his death.

Turu kuru grade figure
Ni-vanuatu sculptor(s)
Asakavasa village, Malo island, Vanuatu
19th century
Wood, pigments
Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, 71.1938.42.8
Don Gabriel Gomichon des Granges, 1935
This sculpture was created to celebrate Chief Kana Supé's promotion to a high grade. The chief's family later sold it to the plantation owner Jean Jacquier, who then gave it to the lawyer Gabriel Gomichon des Granges. Des Granges donated it to the French national collection when the ship La Korrigane visited Port Vila (Vanuatu) in 1935.

This sculpture represents a man from Malo who has achieved a high grade, or rank. His rank is reflected in the symbols of power he wears: the carved shells on his left wrist and the decorations on his headdress. The reliefs on the upper part of the work and the engravings on the abdomen evoke the jawbones of pigs, which were sacrificed to obtain the grade commemorated by this statue. Erected in front of a ceremonial structure, this figure commanded respect.

Sarcophagus of Heriou / Head from a moai sculpture

From ancient Egypt to pre-Hispanic Mexico, funerary masks, reliquaries and stelae served to accompany the dead into the afterlife or to perpetuate their memory among the living. These objects, and the rituals surrounding them, reveal that, in the face of death, these cultures shared a common pursuit: they looked to give meaning to the end of earthly existence.

Sarcophage de Hériou / Tête de sculpture moai

Sarcophagus of Heriou, priest of the gods of the Memphis region
Memphis, Egypt
Ptolemaic Period (200 - 100 BC)
Limestone
Musée du Louvre, Department of Egyptian Antiquities, N 342 = D 6
Inventoried in 1857.

This so-called "anthropoid" sarcophagus bears the shape of the body in wrappings, the head covered with a mask and wearing a heavy wig. The inscription gives the name, titles and lineage of the deceased. Such sarcophagus protects the momified body of the deceased through its solid material as well as the magic of the images and formula with which they are decorated.

Head from a moai sculpture
Rapanui sculptors
Anakena, northern Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)
10th–15th century
Volcanic rock
Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, 71.1935.61.1
Métraux-Lavachery mission, 1934.
The acquisition of a moai head for the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro was one of the objectives of the Métraux-Lavachery scientific expedition (1934–1935), which was jointly financed by France and Belgium. Its ‘removal’, in the words of the Swiss ethnologist Alfred Métraux (1902–1963), took place at the ceremonial site of Anakena, in the north of the island, in 1934, with the approval of the Chilean authorities.

There are several types of large stone moai on Rapa Nui. Many used to stand side-by-side on platforms built on the shore. Facing inland, these monumental statues watched over the clan whose genealogy they evoked. Other moai stand on the slopes of Rano Raraku, the volcano from which the stone was quarried, which seems to have been a sanctuary in itself.

Vishnu / Dionysos

The sacred connects men and women to the supernatural forces in which they believe. Through the ages, whether they worshipped a single creator god (as in Judaism, Christianity and Islam), pantheons of divinities (such as those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans), or further yet spirits and vital forces, people’s relationship to the sacred has led to the creation of imagery and objects on every continent.

These include representations of the divine itself, as with statues of the Greek god Dionysos, of Christ on a Donkey or of the Hindu divinities Vishnu, Bhudevi and Lakshmi.

Vishnu
India Thirubuvanai, state of Tamil Nadu
16th–17th century
Bronze
Musée Guimet – French National Museum of Asian Arts, MG 11394, MG 11395, MG 11396
Gift from the French Ministry of the Colonies (before 1904).

In his upper hands, Vishnu holds two of his distinctive attributes, the conch shell (shankha) and the discus (chakra). The discus, which the divine architect Vishvakarman fashioned from superfluous rays taken from the sun, is a formidable weapon when thrown, bright and burning. Here Vishnu is shown in the company of his two wives, Lakshmi, the goddess of Fortune, and Bhudevi, the goddess of the Earth.

Dionysos
Cyrene, present-day Libya
Second quarter of the 2nd century AD
Marble
Musée du Louvre, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Ma 1778
Purchased 1852, Joseph Vattier de Bourville mission.

In Greek mythology, Dionysos, the son of the god Zeus and the mortal Semele, is the god of wine and theatre. This fragment of a statue depicts him as a beardless youth, clad in a particularly fine nebris (fawn skin). His right arm is raised and his hand would have rested on his head, in a relaxed posture borrowed from statues of Apollo, another major god in the Greek pantheon.