Mille e Tre

In honor of the invitation extended to Umberto Eco, who has chosen as his theme “The Vertigo of Lists”, the Louvre presents an exhibition of graphic works, both ancient and contemporary. “Mille e tre” brings to mind Leporello’s well-known listing of Don Giovanni’s conquests in Mozart’s opera. In publishing, a “leporello” now refers to a catalogue in the form of a fold-out pamphlet.

Lists have been around since antiquity, buried with the deceased in their tombs, evoking the names of divinities, commemorating the greatest athletes, scientific treatises, cataloguing the spoils of war, dynasties… (examples of such lists may be found in rooms 5, 12 and 23 of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities and, in display case 16 of room 3 in the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, in the Code of Hammurabi). They persist in a more intimate fashion in the modern era, in the form of notes on the backs of drawings, in notebooks, and acquire the status of works of art in their own right beginning in the 1970s, with the birth of conceptual art and the notion of “personal mythologies”. Since then, many artists have viewed the act of listing as an important process and as a fundamental aspect of their approach, whether the aim is to recreate the past, to satisfy an encyclopedic bent, to indulge a love of word play and fanciful or absurd juxtapositions, or as matter for graphic experimentation.