A 500-year-old carpet comes home to Cairo's story

In the workshops of Mamluk Cairo more than five centuries ago, craftspeople wove an elaborate wool carpet decorated with three medallions. The object was so coveted that it travelled across the Mediterranean into the hands of Europe’s wealthy and powerful. Popes commissioned such carpets. Courts exchanged them as diplomatic gifts. Last year, that rare carpet made a journey of its own, returning to Europe from Louvre Abu Dhabi, where it now sits in the permanent collection, to be displayed at the Louvre in Paris in a major exhibition on the Mamluk dynasty and its artistic legacy.

For the people who work behind the scenes at the museum, that loan marks something more than a routine exchange between institutions. It is evidence of a transformation that Guilhem Andre has watched unfold from the inside. Andre joined the Louvre Abu Dhabi project in 2012, helping to build its collection and its Asian art programme, and now serves as the museum’s director of scientific, curatorial and collections management.

“We were originally a borrowing institution, but we are moving towards a lending institution as well,” he tells The National. “Since the opening, we’ve lent many of our masterpieces abroad.”

The shift is visible in numbers that matter to anyone who has walked the museum’s galleries. When Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017, many of the artworks on display were borrowed from international institutions and collectors; roughly 30 per cent of the works in the permanent galleries belonged to the museum itself. By 2021, owned works outnumbered loans for the first time. By 2025 their share had reached 56.8 per cent. The collection has grown from around 600 works at opening to more than 6,000 today, counting pieces held in storage or conservation as well as those on view.

The lending side has grown too. Andre recalls that the museum began sending works abroad even before its building opened, and the activity has expanded considerably in recent years. Since opening, it has lent 42 works to exhibitions in the UAE, the Gulf and internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Outgoing loans have more than tripled since 2021.

That decade of work is now documented in Birth of a Collection, a coffee table book edited by Andre that brings together contributions from 42 scholars, curators and historians examining 240 objects, from ancient artefacts to modern and contemporary artworks. It is available online and in select bookstores in English, Arabic and French. The book is a successor to Birth of a Museum, published in 2013 to introduce the founding collection and the plans for a universal museum in the Arab world. This new volume arrives nine years after the museum opened, with a far larger collection to consider and ten years of curatorial work behind it.

For Andre, the book also captures a truth about collecting that any private collector would recognise. “The more you move forward, the more you notice that you have gaps, in fact. So that’s an unending process, collecting,” he says. “But as a museum, of course, we are acting at a very high level, and it’s slightly different because we focus on masterpieces at Louvre Abu Dhabi. That’s why the book is so important, because it shows the process of collecting.”

Some of those gaps have been filled through acquisitions of Asian, African and Oceanian art, areas he says were underrepresented in the museum’s earlier holdings. One example noted in the book is an ornate ivory casket made around 1543 in the Kingdom of Kotte, in what is now Sri Lanka. Decorated with gold, rubies and sapphires, it belongs to a small group of objects sent by the rulers of Kotte to the Portuguese royal court as diplomatic gifts. Louvre Abu Dhabi acquired it in 2024, and for Andre it embodies the kind of stories he wants visitors to encounter, with galleries placing artworks from different civilisations side by side to reveal connections that might otherwise be missed.

“Of course, you could think about collecting everything when you see the word universal museum. In fact, it’s very different because we have a specific mandate of featuring the diversity, the cross-cultural relationships across time, the encounters,” he says. “We not only focus on the artworks themselves, but on the relationship between them, because we put them in dialogue. So this is also the immaterial relationship between them.”

His ambitions reach further still. “We have to dream that one day we can present our permanent galleries entirely through our own collection, allowing the museum to achieve full autonomy,” he says. “And not only that, but also to lend more of our masterpieces to museums internationally and share our story with audiences abroad.”

Whether the museum’s own galleries can one day stand entirely on their own feet, and how many more of its masterpieces will travel to audiences abroad, are questions the next decade of collecting will answer.