Closed in 2003 and originally planned to reopen in 2008, the ‘New Rijksmuseum’ finally opened its completely renovated and restored building to the public on 13th April this year. The Museum’s main building was closed for too long – for many years only a very limited sampling of its holdings was on display in the Philips Wing. One initially feels relief at being able to see once more the extent of the Museum’s superb collections, but this soon turns into admiration for what has been achieved. P.H. Cuypers’s 1885 building, whose original layout and interior had been severely compromised by a series of later interventions, has re-emerged triumphantly, while the newly integrated displays are a tremendous improvement.

On 18th September 2012, the new galleries of the Arts of Islam were inaugurated at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. This vast new display is the most recent and largest in a series of gallery and museum developments devoted to the same subject that have opened over the last decade. The event in Paris was preceded by the reopening of the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in November 2011, and previous openings have included the David Collection in Copenhagen in May 2009, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, in Nov­ember 2008, the Islamic Middle East gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in July 2006, and the Benaki Museum’s new branch museum for Islamic art in Athens in July 2004.