This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Paris
The Louvre, a former royal palace and the world’s largest, most-visited museum, displays some 35,000 pieces dating from 7000BC to the mid-19th century. Everyone gets lost and it doesn’t matter; whatever route taken, whatever objects encountered, the overall impression of human imagination and inventiveness across civilisations and epochs is exhilarating and life-affirming.
But as Louvre president Laurence des Cars has admitted, a visit to the overcrowded museum can also be a “physical ordeal” and some facilities urgently need updating. Last month, President Macron announced a six- year restoration project, including a separate entrance for viewing the Mona Lisa. Most first-time visitors make for the top 10 stops singled out by the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and Winged Victory. I have excluded these from my personal selection, and also the further 30 recommended in the museum’s guide-map, assuming visitors will seek them out according to their preferences. The following choices reflect my own taste but each is an undisputed masterpiece, demonstrating the Louvre’s quality in all areas.
1. Bust of Akhenaten (1352–1335BC)
More than 3,000 years old, this sandstone fragment with its fantastically elongated face and beard, almond eyes and full lips is so lively, so daringly abstracted, that it shrinks millennia, calling to mind Modigliani or Cubist sculpture. Against protests, Pharaoh Akhenaten introduced monotheism — worship of the sun god alone — and decreed an exciting, newly stylised art to express it. For me this androgynous, quasi-geometric figure, with arms crossed on his chest and an ambiguous expression — lofty, questioning, full of inner resolve — is the Louvre’s most enigmatic character. Room 638, Level 1, Sully Wing
2. The Lamassu (720–705BC)
Flooded with natural light through its glass roof, the Cour Khorsabad is home to the excavated remains of a city built by Assyrian King Sargon II near present-day Mosul. It’s a superbly staged, spacious, unmissable evocation of a courtyard in Sargon’s immense palace, which was guarded by these magnificent hybrid beasts, each carved from a single 28-tonne alabaster block. Combining the protective powers of different animals, the Lamassu have bulls’ bodies and ears, eagles’ wings and human faces with fierce broad eyebrows but benevolent smiles. The expressive carving, depicting fur, feathers and hair as dramatically repeated, abbreviated forms, imbues them with life and monumentality — they are at once endearing and majestic. Room 229, Level 0, Richelieu Wing
3. Borghese Centaur (AD100–200)
White marble sculptures, mostly Roman copies of Greek originals, have shimmered in the vaulted Salle des Cariatides since the 17th century. Among many playful creatures, the grizzled Centaur, his human head tweaked at an abrupt angle by the teasing Cupid riding on his back, is ever appealing: metaphor for age and youth, the torments of love, untamed nature versus civilisation. Room 348, Level 0, Sully Wing
4. ‘The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin’ (1435) by Van Eyck
Northern Renaissance painting tends to get overlooked at the Louvre; last year’s special exhibition dedicated to this endlessly captivating, mysterious painting gave it welcome limelight. In its strange contrasts — the worldly, weathered, charismatic chancellor boldly depicted at the same scale as the Virgin; the exquisitely miniaturised, idealised Burgundian city in the distance; the Italianate loggia giving on to an oddly tiny secret garden — the world of medieval illumination marvellously meets the dawn of Flemish naturalism. Room 818, Level 2, Richelieu Wing
5. ‘Virgin and Child with Four Angels’, 1464–69 by Agostino di Duccio
Duccio’s finely wrought marble relief shows his general debt to Donatello — naturalism, dynamism, the delight of spatial illusion — and what is distinctively his own: linear grace, arabesques of swirling drapery and tender, echoing, leaning heads, making marble appear almost ethereal. The under-visited Galerie Donatello has a wealth of individual, engrossing Madonna and Child sculptures by slightly younger contemporaries of the great Florentine pioneer, but none more moving than Duccio’s. Room 160, Level -1, Denon Wing
6. ‘A Table of Desserts’ (1640) by Jan Davidsz de Heem
The velvet curtain is swept aside and the grand tilting fruit platter, embossed bronze chalice with its bird lid and elaborately curving goblet, pose like actors in de Heem’s sumptuous two-metre tabletop theatre. The material precision belongs to Dutch still-life tradition; the carefully composed disarray — half-cut pie, spilling grapes, dishevelled cloth — gives a Baroque thrill of luxurious abandon as well as abundance. Matisse’s famous Cubist version of this painting (1915, MoMA) pays tribute to de Heem’s architectonic construction. De Heem’s painting is currently on tour at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum until April. Room 840, Level 2, Richelieu Wing (from April)
7. ‘The Four Seasons’ (1660-64) by Poussin
Upstairs in the Richelieu Wing, I usually find myself alone with the Poussins: cerebral, clear and models of stoicism. Their emotional impact unfolds slowly and with particular solemnity in this consummate rendering of nature’s power, splendour and variety. “Spring”, perfectly balancing light and shade, is set in the morning. Blocks of ripe corn at high noon announce “Summer”. Evening casts shadows over the grape harvest of “Autumn”, with its hint of Bacchic wildness; then comes the shock of deluge and death in the eerie moonlit “Winter” — still a Classical painting, but pointing far ahead to Romanticism. Room 825, Level 2, Richelieu Wing
8. ‘The Embarkation for Cythera’ (1717) by Watteau
Watteau invented the fête galante, domesticating the pastoral idyll into aristocratic outdoor parties. The easy elegance — lithe, serpentine figures, rustling silken dresses, rhythmic choreography, airy settings — evokes ancien régime privilege but transcends it: a timeless celebration of pleasure and freedom laced in the feathery delicate brushstrokes, broken touches and flickering light, with notes of fragility, melancholy, transience. This was Monet’s favourite work in the Louvre. Room 917, Level 2, Sully Wing
9. ‘Basket of Strawberries’ (1761) by Chardin
The Louvre’s most recent purchase was achieved by a donation from LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and 10,000 individual contributions, proving Chardin a beloved emblem of French painting and cultural identity. The pyramid of strawberries, their luscious red reflected in the glass of water, the colour balanced by the cherries on the right and the silvery accents of the scattered flowers, is an exceptional example of his transparency of light, colour harmony, poetry in apparent simplicity. It will join the Chardin rooms this year. Room 920, Level 2, Sully Wing (to be confirmed)
10. ‘Women of Algiers’ (1834) by Delacroix
No visitor misses the huge Romantic statement pictures — Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”, Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus” — in the Salles Rouges. The (relatively) small jewel here is Delacroix’s most beautiful painting, recently cleaned, glowing in its chromatic complexity and limpid strokes. Every inch of “Women of Algiers” is a surface for sensuality and seduction — billowing embroidered costumes, glittery earrings, anklets, pearls, a pale pink rose in dark hair, gold slippers thrown casually on patterned rugs — yet these lavishly adorned women are impassive, gloriously indifferent to us. Cézanne said this painting “enters the eye like a glass of wine . . . and makes you drunk straightaway”. Room 700, Level 1, Denon Wing
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