 The Director-General of Royal Museums was able to get Louis XVIII to set aside political distaste and authorize the purchase of David's "Rape of the Sabine Women" and "Thermopyle" for the Louvre, and, even more daring Théodore Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa", which Forbin had been pressing as a royal purchase, and which was eventually bought from the painter's heirs in 1824.Under his guidance post-Renaissance sculptures were brought together and exhibited as the "musée d'Angolême", from the rooms that had served Napoleon's Council of State were exorcised new decorative paintings and allegorical ceilings by the most current painters (1825–1827), and a "musée Charles X" opened in 1827 to display Etruscan and Egyptian antiquities.The palais du Luxembourg was opened as a museum of contemporary art purchased by the State.