How do you solve a problem like the Louvre? Perhaps you can’t.

The world’s most famous and most-visited museum started as a medieval military fortress, then became a palace. It took a revolution to turn it into a museum. Royals and rulers renovated it more than 20 times, satisfying their vanity but leaving behind an incoherent structure that sits on 25 different levels and stretches for half a mile. It exhibits over 30,000 of its 500,000 artworks in more than 400 rooms.

And it is this convoluted history and identity that make the Louvre a structure that is so difficult to monitor, oversee and protect .

“The Louvre is a palace that doesn’t have the logic of a museum,” said Gérard Araud, the president of the Society of Friends of the Louvre. “It is a universe unto itself.”

The brazen

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