Louvre of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof (fashioned from almost 9,000 steel tubes that form an interior web) that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre's south wing. The galleries, which the museum had initially hoped to open by 2009, represent the first major architectural intervention at the Louvre since the addition of I.M. Pei's glass pyramid in 1989. On 5 February 2015, about one hundred archaeologists, protesting against commercial private involvement to protect France's heritage, blocked Louvre's ticket desks to facilitate free access to the museum. At
Paris in the Middle Ages of the French Kings in the Abbey of Saint-Denis. The sculptor Jean de Liège, from Flanders, sculpted images of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon for the château of the Louvre, as well as several tombs for members of the royal family at Saint Denis. Stained glass, or "vitrail", the use of small plaques of colored glass joined by lead to depict historic events and figures, was not invented in Paris. It was recorded in texts in other parts of Europe in the late 9th century, but in Paris of the 12th and 13th centuries, it reached new heights of