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 16th century Caryatids on the music platform of the ceremonial hall of the Louvre (1550-51); and the Four Seasons decorating the facade of the Musée Carnavalet (1547); Pierre Bontemps (1505-1568), who created sculptures for the tomb of Francis I and a funeral monument for Charles de Marigny (1556), now in the Louvre; and Germain Pilon (1525-1590), who made the extremely realistic funerary figures of Henry II of France and Catherine de'Medici for their tombs in the Basilica of Saint Denis, as well as the 385 grotesque masquerons which decorate the Pont Neuf. The most prominent Paris novelist of the period was François